Spotlight at the National Careers Service
Four great reasons to get a Skills Health Check
Our Skills Health Check tools are a set of exercises that can help you find out what your strengths are and what makes you tick as a person.
You may hear this type of activity called a number of things, from a psychometric test to a diagnostic skills assessment. These tests aren’t new – they have been used for over a hundred years. Most of them consist of one or both of these:
- an ability/aptitude test – this finds out what your skills are, and is usually split into categories like ability with numbers, ability with words, working with shapes and sequences, and solving mechanical problems. It is usually a set of questions with multiple choice answers from which you choose the one you think is correct.
- a personality questionnaire – this finds out what motivates you, and which personal style you use in your approach to work and tasks. You usually get a set of statements that you have to rate on how accurately this describes you.
The main aim of our Skills Health Check tools are to help you to make informed career decisions, but they can be useful for other things too, which we also look at below.
Making career decisions
There are a number of psychometric tests out there, each of them similar but also with a few differences. Broadly speaking, they can help you to find out what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, what is important to you and what type of personality you have. This is all key information you can use to choose a career that you will find interesting and be good at.
Finding out your strengths and weaknesses
Once you know what your strengths are, you can start to make the most of them. You can prepare examples of when you’ve used the strengths, and put them on your CV and talk about them in interviews.
If there’s one skill you’re much better at than others, you could use this to guide your career choice. For example, if you’re good with words you could choose a job area in which you’d use these skills every day – in journalism or legal work, for example.
And if you find there’s a skill area you’re not so strong at, you can decide – do I want to improve on this, or is having this skill not important to me? If you want to improve your skills in a certain area, you could look at doing a course or some voluntary work.
Preparing for assessment centres
Many employers use psychometric tests to find people whose skills and personalities are best suited to their jobs and training programmes. Employers can use online tests early in the recruitment process and then more in-depth ones later in the process where you turn up in person, sometimes to an assessment centre. The more you practise these tests the more relaxed you are likely to be when you do them.
Increasing your self-awareness
Many of us don’t spend time analysing ourselves, but it is always a useful exercise. We are all individuals with different strengths, weaknesses, and life experiences. But not only that, we also change as we grow older, as we take on different roles such as husband/wife or parent, and move into different phases in our lives. Self-analysis needn’t be self-indulgent; it’s about finding out where you’re at, what’s important to you and what makes you tick at this particular point in your life.
Hints and tips on psychometric tests
- practise them – use our Skills Health Check and search online for other tests
- when used by employers, be aware of time limits – try to find a balance between completing a lot of questions quickly and completing fewer questions but more accurately (you could even ask the recruiter for an idea of how the scores are weighted)
- with personality tests try to be consistent and honest – there aren’t any right or wrong answers, so don’t choose the options you think the tester wants to hear (sometimes the same question is included with different wording to see if you respond the same way – if you’re being honest you will probably be more consistent)
- try to get some advance warning of which tasks the test will involve, then you can practise.
Why not try our Skills Health Check tools today? It’s often useful to talk through your test results with a careers adviser, who can help you make connections between your results and the types of jobs they would match. Call 0800 100 900 to talk it through over the phone or arrange a face-to-face meeting.
