I’ve taken lots of different career tests, how is yours better?

I’ve taken lots of different career tests, how is yours better?

Pathfinders aptitude testing gives you information that you “don’t know” about yourself. Our career testing measures your actual potential and innate ability to perform specific tasks.

The bulk of the widely available career tools are not really “tests”—they are skill inventories and interest questionnaires. These coventional tools are only meant to take a survey of your learned skills and interests. Interest inventories are self-examinations that ask you what you like and dislike. They are not designed to help you surface new information, but rather to state what you already know about yourself.

The shortfall of the traditional skill inventory is that you may have learned skills in school that do not engage your best innate aptitude or personality characteristics. For instance, we’ve met doctors who learned the skills to be a surgeon, but don’t have the spatial reasoning aptitude to really excel in their field. Over time, they found that their skills alone were not enough to keep them fully engaged and excited about their work.

The key distinction to make is that skills are learned, while aptitudes are your genetic endowment. Since human beings are so adaptable, we can force ourselves into careers that don’t suit our best abilities. Skills can be added and subtracted from your repertoire throughout life; your aptitudes are innate and unchanging.

Your inborn abilities are what make you unique; they are the deck of cards dealt to you by Mother Nature. By understanding how to use your best inborn aptitudes, and how they fit the career world out there, you’ll be able to focus your efforts on learning skills that rely on and fully engage your best natural strengths.