Play To Your Strengths

Have you ever taken a moment to stop and think, what am I good at? You may do well in your major and you may be really involved in your extracurricular activities. BUT, what makes you good at those things?

Becoming self-aware of your strengths is critical to your career development. This knowledge allows you to reflect on the parts about you that are the core of your work ethic.  Once you are conscious of this, you are able to apply these strengths to pretty much any field. The purpose of this is to open you up to opportunities and help you find something in yourself that you probably didn’t even know existed before.

Virginia Tech Career Services pays for several professional resources that assess your strengths. Our most popular ones include:

Strengths Quest: http://www.dsa.vt.edu/aspirations/strengths/

This assessment categorizes you into your top five strengths, out of over 30 possible strengths. Examples of strengths are Relator, Responsibility, Empathy, etc. The purpose of these strengths are to allow exploration. With this information, “students can be intentional in investing in their talents, expanding their curiosities, and putting those talents to use.”

Myplan.com: http://www.myplan.com/

This assessment focuses on interests, values, personality type, and skills to direct your attention to potential careers relating to each. It encompasses its own assessments, personal anecdotes, with explanations about why some careers fit some strengths. Be sure to get the appropriate code from Career Services to take the assessments for free!

Do What You Are: (Get the assessment in the office with an appointment)

This assessment focusing on personality type is one of the more popular ones known to universities and employers, due to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. When you take this tool, you have the possibility of being one of 16 different personalities. The assessment is based on your initial preferences to certain values and traits. The result may describe you exactly! It’s remarkable how well this assessment can identify your personality. Then, for your own reference, the results categorize what your personality works best at. There is an abundance of information that can come from this assessment.

To learn more about what personality type can mean to you, check out this link: http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/

Why are these assessments beneficial to you?

All three of these tools are known worldwide for self-exploration. Then, to better utilize this information, some assessments use your results to suggest what you would be good at in a career. Another really great feature about these assessments is that they focus on the positives. Everyone has something positive to contribute to a job. Instead of focusing on what you can’t do, you can focus on the things you can do! It is positive psychology incorporated into a professional sense.

To find out more about who you are, check out the links provided in this page of our career site: http://www.career.vt.edu/MajorCareerExploration/SelfAssessment.html

We also encourage you to make an appointment with a full time Career Advisor to better understand the purpose of and results from all these assessments.