Career Self Assessment
MBA Career Self-Assessment
Unlock your potential and make informed career decisions with insightful self-assessments! This page guides you through tools and techniques to evaluate your skills, interests, and values. Whether you’re starting your journey or considering a career shift, understanding yourself is the first step toward a fulfilling professional life. Explore, reflect, and take charge of your future!
Assessing Yourself
The first step to good career decisions is to take stock of yourself. The best career choices match closely with who you are as a professional and as a person. So, rather than looking outwardly at the work world and job market, you need first to look inward and assess what makes you tick. Career-development experts break these down into 3 main categories: your skills, interests, and values.
The 3 Elements of Career Choice
Skills
What You Are Good At: These include innate talents and aptitudes as well as capabilities you have learned along the way. Areas of knowledge also fit this category.
Interests
What You Like To Do: The most important kinds of interests are the activities and task you like to engage in, as well as the kinds of knowledge you like to work with.
Values
What Is Important To You: These are essentially the priorities for your life which may include social issues, personal values, but can also encompass things like lifestyle issues, earnings potential, corporate cultures, etc.
Assessment Options
There are 2 main ways to approach this process of identifying these themes and patterns. One is through self-directed self-assessment and reflection. The other is to use formal assessment instruments that can make those trends easier to identify. Assessment tools can also compare your profile to people in various career fields and industries to find areas of alignment, which can indicate the career areas where you are more likely to find satisfaction.
As you explore these areas of yourself, you will want to be identifying the themes or patterns that emerge in these areas. To assist with your decision making, you will want to differentiate between those items that you are good at and enjoy versus items that you are not particularly good at nor enjoy. You will also want to take note of where your skill, interests, or values diverge from others as those are the areas that make you unique and which you may want to capitalize.
Once you have a clearer sense of the above, you will need to perform your due diligence to find the career/functional areas, industries, and roles that will most closely fit your needs. This means doing research to find out as much as you can about your options to enable you to make decisions with clarify and confidence.
Self Assessment Through Personal Reflection
As you’ve thought about getting your MBA you’ve probably also started to consider which job you may want to pursue post-graduation. The universe of MBA jobs is vast! Open your mind to the possibilities (now). If you eliminate certain careers, note why.
Analyze Your Current and Past Jobs
Answering questions like those below will help you identify your most relevant skills and preferences and match them to the work and work environments that might best suit you. Your honest answers to these questions can help you better understand what you bring to an employer and what you are looking for in your next position.
How would you summarize your career to date?
Which jobs did you like the most/least?
Which tasks/responsibilities did you love/hate?
If you have ever envied someone else’s job, what was that job and why?
What do you do best?
What is most important to you?
What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
What three adjectives would a colleague or boss use to describe you?
In what type of environment do you function best?
How can you add value?
To Broaden Your Thinking About Career Options, Also Make A List Of The Following:
Functional Interests
Industry Preferences
Geographic Preferences
Other Considerations (family, work-life balance, etc.)
Use all of the above to start a list of the jobs, functions, and industries you’d like to explore further.
Self-Assessment Through CareerLeader
CareerLeader Assessment Tool
CareerLeader® is a career-exploration assessment designed for people in business careers. Over 100 top MBA schools in the United States and Europe use this tool.
It can assist you in choosing, or confirming, your MBA career path. This self-assessment integrates your interests, motivators, and skills to recommend specific business careers and organizational cultures for you to further explore.
Career Leader® is built on the premise that one’s interests, motivators, and skills will drive future career success and satisfaction. Understanding your results will help you clarify your career mission before getting tactical in your search.
For more including a request form visit the CareerLeader page of the Additional Resources section.
Taking the Assessment
Be sure to complete CareerLeader at a time and place where there are no adverse conditions (illness, lack of sleep, work overload, etc.) to ensure nothing skews your feelings and, hence, your results. Also, without rushing, try to work fairly quickly, as your first gut reaction to a question is likely your most honest one.
CareerLeader consists of four sections:
INTERESTS—Business Career Interest Inventory
- Discovers your interests in a business context
- Is stable over time
- Requires 25 to 30 minutes to complete
MOTIVATORS—Leadership Motivations Profile
- Helps you prioritize what motivates you in your work
- Has limited stability over time; impacted by changes in your personal priorities and internal motivators
- Requires 15 minutes to complete
SKILLS—Leadership Skills Profile
- Helps you identify your top career-relevant skills
- Has limited stability over time; changes as you develop competencies and expertise
- Requires 15 minutes to complete
ENVIRONMENTS –
- Provides excellent content on the standard elements that are in work environments and your preferences within them
In addition to a comprehensive report, CareerLeader provides you with web‐based access to interpretive guides for all of the above assessments to help you understand your results.
Interpreting Your Results
- Interests
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- Interested are the single most important factor in career satisfaction and success – by far.
- Look at the big picture – results a whole vs. each piece.
- Motivators
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- Results are what you find most motivating as you think about positions.
- Highest possible score is 12. Scores in the 10-12 range are considered very high, 7-9 high. Pay most attention to these motivators.
- Skills
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- Results are based on how your self-evaluation compares with that of other business professionals.
- CareerMatch
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- The higher the number, the better your interest/skill/motivator profile matched that career than of other business professionals’ profiles.
- Look for themes among your High or Very High career matches.
- Surprised? Click on that career on the website to learn more. You may have some misconceptions about the career in question!
- The CareerLeader website has much more information about each career. Take time to read the Overview and Key Factors for each of your top career matches.
- Have the courage to explore. People often convince themselves that they want, and are a good match for, careers that they would actually dislike and in which they are likely to be unsuccessful.
- CultureMatch
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- Read this section carefully to identify points that seem particularly on target for you.
- Reflect on how your comfort in different cultures in the past and how those experiences relate to your CultureMatch results.
- Use this information to write a description of the ideal work culture for you. You may or may not be able to find an organization that fits the description perfectly, but you will have a clearer sense of what to be on the lookout for.
- Be On Alert
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- Section pinpoints any vulnerabilities that CareerLeader has identified as possible pitfalls for you in a job search, or on the job.
- Be cognizant of these as you progress through your career decision making and job search.
Other Considerations
- Talk with your peers, Career & Leadership Coach, and others about your CareerLeader results.
- Career Leader isn’t ‘the answer.’ Use your results as a guide in your career decision-making.
- Come back to it when you need it, e.g. for interviews, when you feel ‘stuck,’ or when evaluating an offer.
- You can’t keep all your options open; you need a focus point.
- You need a clear career strategy to execute, along with a solid backup plan.
- You are the pilot of your career, not a passenger.
Related Material
Global Assessment
GlobeSmart is an online cultural learning platform that allows you to enhance your intercultural knowledge and explore your and others’ communication styles and work preferences. In the Learning Modules, gain insights into best practices in teaming, managing and leading in inclusive ways, so that you can further leverage diversity and maximize team performance.
This online learning platform is an important resource for you and is accessible during your entire UNC program. Here are a few specific ways the platform can help you:
Using The GlobeSmart Platform
- Sign in with your Kenan-Flagler email address.
- Complete or update your GlobeSmart Profile*
- Explore the Learning Modules and use the GlobeSmart Culture Guides to discover more about the country(ies) you will be traveling to and compare your Profile to the country(ies)
- Complete the Culture Guide’s “Test My Knowledge” quiz to track your learning progress.
The GlobeSmart platform is provided by the Global Business Center and Global Education Initiative.
*Those who used the previous GlobeSmart platform prior to the June 10 relaunch will need to setup their profile again.