9 Online Personality Tests to Take Now | On Careers

If you are currently job searching or considering a new career path, it can be difficult to determine the best career fit, especially if you need to find something quickly.

When scanning job postings, you may focus on the skills and qualifications listed on the post. But it’s important to consider whether the positions you’re applying for are a good fit for you as well. One way to determine whether that is the case is by taking a career test to understand your personality type.

A career test or assessment is a tool that generally uses questions to help you gain insight into your strengths, values, interests and personality. You are generally provided with suggestions regarding career paths or recommendations about your next career move.

Keep in mind: You shouldn’t base your next career move solely on your personality. However, learning more about your personality type is important when thinking about your ideal career or a new career move for two reasons.

First, it helps you to discover the tasks, responsibilities and roles for which you would be best suited in a job. Second, it helps determine the right culture, work environment and typical schedule that would best fit you. Your personality type has a big influence on your overall career fit and how successful you will be in the long run.

Here are nine online personality tests that will help you learn more about yourself, thus helping you in your next career steps:

One of the best-known personality tests, the Myers-Briggs assessment is used by many professionals to better understand their personality type and how it relates to different aspects of their career. The test determines personality types depending on how a person ranks on the four categories: introversion and extroversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, and judging and perception. The paid test provides a comprehensive analysis of the results.

The official DiSC profile test is not free, but it is more complete and comprehensive than the free assessment. This test not only helps you determine your dominant traits and tendencies – dominance, influence, steadiness or conscientiousness – but also how you work best with other personality types.

The free DISC profile determines your personality type based on the tendencies mentioned above and your individual behavioral traits. The free results are limited but establish your most important values and key personality factors.

This 177-question test takes an hour to complete. The Clifton Strengths Assessment measures your talents and top strengths as well as your thinking, feeling and behaving patterns. This test is good for professionals who want to better understand what they do best, their ideal career and how to apply it in that field.

This free online assessment will help you get a start on identifying your top five strengths. According to the High5 website, knowing your strengths can help you understand yourself and strengthen your career and relationships.

The Enneagram is an emotionally based system that describes personalities by nine different types. These types depend on emotional, intellectual or instinctual intelligence. This type of test can help you better understand your strengths and weaknesses. Truity offers the personality test here. It is free to take and there is a fee to view your full results.

This free personality test will show you the five main traits of your personality, along with your strengths and weaknesses. This breakdown of your traits allows you to set goals for improvement in specific areas.

This type of quiz is useful for all professionals, and especially for those who want to assume a leadership role. This free quiz from GlobaLeadership Foundation is a good place to start.

While this isn’t a true personality test, this free assessment can help you get started with identifying what kinds of jobs interest you. This is great if you are considering a career change since career ideas are provided to you based on your interests.

It’s important to remember that no matter which personality type is dominant, you will have elements of each of the archetypes as part of your personality. You want to learn most about your dominant archetype. Once you take a personality test, review your results with a close friend, career coach or mentor. They can help you decipher your results and how your most outstanding personality traits can impact your career possibilities.

For example, if you tend to generate novel concepts and ideas but lack follow-through, you will need a job that allows you to think creatively, come up with new ideas and have other people help implement them. On the other hand, if you possess a strong desire to implement detailed solutions and ideas, you might prefer jobs that require you to be detail-oriented.

Online personality tests can be useful and fun, but keep in mind that they can also be limited. You may not like all of the suggested career ideas. You may even find that you get conflicting results depending on the test you take or how you are feeling when you take an online assessment. View a personality test as one of many tools to help you think outside the box and find a career that fits.