Sunday 17 January 2010

Free Online Self-Tests

Creating the free self-assessment tools made me wonder how many similar self-tests and personal development quizzes are available online, so I had a quick search.

In this post you'll find some links to some others that you will find online, some notes on what is good about them and some thing that they miss, and what the self-test tools I'm pulling together do to plug those gaps.

Here are some of the better online self-assessments that I found:

There were also loads that I found that weren't that helpful

A whole range of sites that I stumbled across in my search contained loads of quizzes that had clearly been pulled together purely for entertainment and not to really help understand ourselves or take action.

You commonly find similar quizzes on social networking sites like Facebook and in email chain letters too.

Not a bad thing, but a bit of a waste of time if you're actually filling them in for a real purpose.

Probably the best of these that I found was "Quiz Stop", which provides a good range of different categories of self-test quizzes: http://www.quizstop.com/


Aside from the "purely for fun" ones, are the useful ones really any good?

Well, most of them are okay. None of the ones that I found were particularly ground-breaking - but then, they're not going to be.

All any self-test like this will give you is a fairly superficial indication of yourself - but it is how well that indication is produced and presented, and more importantly how easily you can act on it, that makes the big difference.


The thing that was missing from them

The real thing that was missing in most of them was clear guidance on what the results really mean and what you can do with them.

In particular, in most cases these tests lead to a summary screen that focusses on what you are, with no reference to what you are *not*. Often it is this comparison, the identification of areas for improvement, that can help you take action that makes a difference. This goes hand-in-hand with advice on what you can do to balance out in those areas where you are doing *too much* of one thing or *not enough* of another.

Whilst a big part of this responsibility falls on you, the tests should at least provide some pointers if they are to be of any real use.


The tools on this Business-Life-Success blog don't fall into this trap

The tools I've been pulling together do show exactly where you scored well in what areas, in comparison with other alternative areas, and include some guidance on the "why": http://business-life-success.blogspot.com/2010/01/free-self-assessment-tools-adapted-from.html

They're based on the book "The Ultimate Career Success Workbook: Tests and Exercises to Assess Your Skills and Potential!", by Ron Yeung (links to this book on Amazon are provided below).

This is available to buy at the following locations, but you can also download the full book to "try before you buy", along with a whole load of other books, as described in the following post: http://business-life-success.blogspot.com/2010/01/fantastic-100-free-self-help-books-to.html

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For loads of great personal development and self-help books for business and personal success, check out one of these tailored book stores:

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2 comments:

  1. Dr. Rajshekhar Karlekar20 January 2010 at 14:37

    hi
    interesting links.
    And Intersting artical also.
    Thanx
    Rajshekahr
    http://bodynmindbalance.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul Jones20 January 2010 at 20:15

    Hi Rajshekahr,

    Glad you found the links and article useful.

    Thanks for stopping by...

    Cheers

    Paul

    ReplyDelete

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