Blogs

1- Tool for career self-exploration, career exploration tools

Personality development is an important part of your career. But what is it? You can call it a process where you work on yourself to strengthen and nurture your talents while adding new and relevant skills to your armory. Though none of us is born with the capability to outshine everyone else in different fields, you can definitely bank on experience and training that empower you to use your talents to strive in your chosen career. Thus, in a way, personality development is an integral part of skill development since it helps you get ready to express your thoughts and take the necessary actions backed by clarity and precision.

When you talk about your personality, you’re referring to the stable attributes that get reflected in your behavior and the approach you use to communicate with people around you. In a way, you can say soft skills and personality development go hand in hand. And by investing time in personality development, you can become more appealing and agreeable as you learn the best way to present yourself in various situations and even handle them to progress in your career.

Though some may dismiss personality development, it’s nevertheless important for your career. Being aware of your personality traits, including what your weaknesses and strengths are, is a prerequisite to kick-start your career development and direct your professional growth down the right path. Since personality development lets you look inward and know yourself better, it can benefit your career in different ways. Be it the best way to handle a heavy workload, deciding your approach to meet a complex project deadline, or examining if you have the necessary leadership skills for your dream job, knowing about your personality traits can help you figure out all these and a lot more. And once you’re aware of your personality traits, you can use career exploration tools to develop your personality. Not sure how to do this? The answer is simple - learning how to best use your strengths and weaknesses and even acquire new skills to excel at your chosen career and taking yourself to the next level at your workplace with speedy career growth.

2- Impact of personality development on your career

Personality development is closely related to your professional growth and how well your career will develop. Wondering why it’s so? Because your personality has a deep connection with what your potential is and how well you do at work. You’ll find considerable scientific evidence that your personality traits are strongly and directly associated with factors that impact your professional growth and your career development - either positively or negatively. Let’s consider a simple example to drive home the point. A and B are two front-office executives working in company X. A is happy doing the bare minimum that his job entails - attending phone calls throughout the day. But B isn’t. He works on himself to constantly upgrade his skills and takes an active interest in other departments that are related to his job profile, including logistics, administration, etc. He even doesn’t mind chipping in and helping these departments from time to time to put his newly acquired skills to test and use. Who do you think will be preferred for a promotion to the next level and perhaps, a better and broader job profile? Definitely B, isn’t it?

In the modern workplace today, you can no longer survive by doing just what the job entails. For example, a marketing executive can’t rest easy after he has fulfilled his daily quota to call a specific number of clients or brief them about his company offers. He’ll need to handle additional tasks too, such as figuring out and implementing creative marketing strategies and techniques to not only sell his organization’s offerings but also attract potential clients while retaining the existing customers. And doing all these would be easier with personality development.

Perhaps by now, you understand why personality development is crucial for your career. Though a physical career counselor can help you with it, what should you do if you can’t get access to one? The best solution is to choose a reliable online tool for career self-exploration, like CounselHero. Knowing yourself better is often the first step, and such an automated tool will help you do just that. Let’s see the steps to proceed.

3- How to use career exploration tools for self-exploration

Self-exploration is an indispensable step in the process of awakening career aspirations. Career counselors use a wide range of career exploration tools to identify an individual’s interests, skills, aptitudes, and values as they pertain to career decisions and work. This process of knowing yourself better has the potential to encourage the type of self-reflection and self-awareness that are priceless for college and career readiness.

If you need a virtual tool for career self-exploration, you should know what features to look for in it to ensure it’s capable of letting you identify your abilities, skills, work values, interests, and preferences. For instance, having a tool that lets users get useful insights about themselves while paving the way to tap into diverse language abilities, learning styles, and preferred forms of expression will help them gain greater self-awareness, which is essential to an authentic career planning process.

Here are the three key things your chosen tool for career self-exploration should offer:

1. Self-assessment tests

Technology-driven, automated tests for self-assessment should help you develop a thorough understanding of your personality traits, aptitudes, interests, preferences, skills, social inclinations, and more. The tests should be dynamic and based on strong logic and algorithm that lets every individual get a personalized result, not a cookie-cutter response where a set of the same questions are thrown to everyone. For example, when you use CounselHero’s assessment tests, you’ll get a choice to take up the ones that help you identify your skills, character, interests, values, and social stand. Since each of these tests has a different algorithm, logic, and result scale, all the results are integrated to deliver every test taker a unique outcome. This way, you can know yourself better and decide which career would suit your personality as well as strengths, weaknesses, aptitude, and interests the best.

2. Let you zero in on a career path

Did you know the average person is estimated to spend more than 80,000 hours of his life working? When you spend such a major part of your life in work, your chosen career path will surely have a massive impact on almost every facet of your life. That’s why it’s crucial to select your career wisely. However, it’s easier said than done. You may have several questions like these:

• Where do I begin?
• How do I select a career when I’m clueless about what I’m interested in?
• What if I end up choosing a career that’s unfit for me?

The answers to all these can be found in the results of assessment tests you have taken earlier using a tool for career self-exploration. Based on your personality and other attributes, you can make an exhaustive list of careers that fit your interests, skills, personality, aptitude, preferences, and professional and personal goals. While some careers on this list would be more aligned to your assessment results (which you can call primary careers), others may be considered secondary careers that will still let you leverage your inherent skills, interests, and personality but won’t match as well as the primary careers. The key to selecting a career is to see the match, research each career based on what its educational requirements are, the typical job profiles you can expect to get, earning potential, and the overall employment outlook. Taking all these factors into account will let you narrow your list down to a handful of options for further consideration.

3. Help you to develop a strategy to attain your career goals

Reliable career exploration tools shouldn’t stop at helping you identify your personality traits or selecting a career. They should also help you develop a strategy to achieve your career goals and put that strategy into action. For example, after you have identified a career you want to pursue, from finding what personality traits you need for it, the courses you should take up, and deciding on your majors to distributing your course load, and finding work-based learning opportunities, your chosen tool should let you find relevant information and resources for all. Thus, your strategy should include meticulous planning for honing specific personality traits and acquiring some others (say, stress tolerance, leadership, resilience, and the capacity to cope with a demanding work setting), obtaining any training you’ll need to qualify for your desired position, developing your resume, finding mentoring and networking opportunities, and deciding on an action plan on how you’ll be proceeding to engage potential employers.

When your physical career counselor or virtual tool for career self-exploration helps you with these features, you’ll be able to plan your career roadmap better to effectively work toward achieving your career and life goals while taking advantage of your personality traits.