Assessing Your Interests
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
Life is too short to be spent doing work you don’t like. While we all need to pay our bills and save for our futures, and while no job is perfect (even people doing their dream job don’t like it some days), we spend too much time working accept being miserable there. If you can get a job that’s in the top 20% of what you’re good at, top 20% of what you like, and top 20% of what you can get paid for your skills, that’s a win! Not that you shouldn’t aim higher than that going forward, but you’re at a great place to take your time while you figure out your next step. This post focuses on identifying and categorizing your interests with the CareerForce Interest Assessment. The results page describes six interest categories and how much affinity you have for each, as well as what career clusters could fit well with your interests.
- Log into your job seeker account and complete your Interest Assessment, if one is available
o Be sure to save your results for future reference
o If one is not available on your state’s job seeker website, you might benefit from taking the CareerForce assessment and exploring some recommended webpages, knowing you won’t be eligible for appointments, events, or other such personal support if you’re not a Minnesota resident
- Review each of the categories and career clusters listed to see what you may have an affinity for
- Consider these results in comparison to the skills you identified in the previous post, as well as any initial job interests you had, for how you might find that type of job in a strongly matching interest category and an industry listed in that category
Complete your Interest Assessment
While this assessment is a little longer than the Employment Readiness Assessment, it should still be easy to complete within 15 minutes. Similar to the ERA, plan to spend more time reviewing and thinking about the results of your Interest Assessment than you’ll spend answering the assessment questions. By taking the assessment after logging into your CareerForce account, your Interest Assessment results are saved to your dashboard by clicking Submit on the final page of questions. Know that when reviewing these results on your dashboard later, clicking Cancel will not clear your results but clicking Start Over will. Make a note on your calendar to come back and review and reflect on your assessment results at least once a month during your search for a better paying job. An example of the results page is shown below, so you know what to expect after completing your assessment.
Results of a CareerForce Interest Assessment.
Review categories and career clusters
What type of person are you based on your assessment results? Does this give you any new insight into how you think and like to work? Read through the descriptions of at least your top two categories and the industries associated with them. Can you see yourself doing your next job in any of those? Keep this in the back of your mind in the coming days as you continue through the next several posts to prepare to land your next, higher paying job.
You might consider supplementing this with another personality or aptitude inventory, such as 16 Personalities or the interest assessment in the parachute book mentioned in the previous post about identifying your skills. Even when assessments like these aren’t strictly career-focused, they could still be valuable for understanding who you are and what your personal strengths and weaknesses are. Knowing this is valuable not only for enhancing your performance in your next job, but also for succeeding in the interview you’ll probably have to complete to be offered that job.
Compare your interests to your skills
Now that you’ve done some work to understand what your employment interests are, how well do those interests match the skills you have? Hopefully by considering this, you can get an idea of “what jobs can I do that I probably would both be good at and enjoy doing?”. As you identify specific jobs that align well with both your skills and interests, check the employment outlook for those jobs, and hopefully you'll find a few options that you are good at, like to do, and can get paid more money for!
Conclusion
Take stock of your interests today to learn more about what kinds of work you like to do (or at least think you would like to do). Be sure to save your assessment results to review them at least monthly until you land a better paying job. Plan on spending at least as much time reviewing and reflecting on your assessment results as you do on taking the assessment. Compare your interests to the skills you identified from the previous post to determine both what you are good at and what you enjoy doing.
Log into your job seeker account and take your interest assessment right away!
The next step on the roadmap: Stay tuned for the next post coming in a few days!
