Benefits of a Career Aptitude Test

A career aptitude test is the perfect way to learn about your strengths, your likes and dislikes, and how these affect thinking about and planning for a career. As an academic advisor for freshman and sophomores in higher education, I saw many students who did not know what they wanted to do for a career or that had a good sense of their specific aptitudes. When I would work with these students, I always recommended they take a career aptitude test to find out what they are good at, what they like to do, and how to blend these into a career path.

I typically had to help students understand the differences between a career aptitude test, an ability test, and an achievement test. I would often recommend they take not only a career aptitude test but a specific ability test as well. Although many people use these terms interchangeably, they do not mean the same thing. Achievement means what you have achieved or accomplished, ability means what you can do now, and aptitude means the quickness or ease of what you can learn in the future.

A career aptitude test will assess your aptitude in a number of areas including: 1) general learning aptitude is your aptitude to "catch on", to reason, and to make judgments, 2) verbal reasoning is your aptitude to understand and reason by applying concepts or ideas framed in words, 3) numerical reasoning is your aptitude to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts, 4) perceptual aptitude is your aptitude to understand and comprehend information received through your senses (visual, auditory etc., 5) spatial is your aptitude to think visually (in your mind) about geometric shapes and to understand 2 and 3 dimensional objects, 6) clerical is your aptitude to be able to look at written or verbal material and see differences in copy, to proofread words and numbers, and to avoid perceptual errors in math computations, 7) motor coordination is your aptitude to coordinate eyes, hands, and fingers accurately and with speed, 8) finger dexterity is your aptitude to use your fingers to handle and move small objects rapidly and with accuracy, 9) manual dexterity is your aptitude to move your hands easily and with accuracy.

Although this may seem like a long list, having this kind of information from a career aptitude test will shed a great deal of light on what types of aptitudes are strengths for you, which ones are average, and which ones are deficits. Knowing and understanding the information provided by a career aptitude test helps students hone in on their strengths and use this information to find careers in which they can apply these aptitudes. Taking a career aptitude test is kind of like fortune telling - it helps you predict the future.