Synthesize Your Findings

Assess Yourself

Assessing yourself is a key step to understanding options that suit you in your academics, career, and personal life. With key insights about yourself, you are empowered to consider options that match your needs, goals, and priorities, as you move toward an informed decision for your future.

Your career development is a lifelong process, and engaging in regular reflection will prove to be valuable as you evolve and grow through its many phases. Use this page to get familiar with the free assessments that we offer, learn how to take an assessment, and adopt a reflective mindset to tune in to the one, true, you.

A Holistic Review

Using the insights you gained from your self-assessment activities, look for patterns within your tendencies. Patterns indicate that a trend of repeated behaviors, choices, or qualities exists, often a reliable source of information to guide life decisions. A pattern that presents itself consistently across various settings or periods is worth exploring further.

It is also helpful to consider the relationship between the many aspects of yourself as they relate to the decision you are trying to make. Factors such as your interests, personality, strengths, and values sometimes overlap and, at other times, distinctly differ.

For example, sometimes a person may find that they have an interest in playing guitar, but after assessing their strengths, they may ultimately decide that their natural guitar abilities do not provide a substantial opportunity to yield success as a professional guitar player. Other times, someone may find that these aspects overlap, which could be the difference between pursuing the guitar as a hobby versus a career. This is just one of many examples of how career identities form.

Making It Memorable

No matter how you have assessed yourself, it can be helpful to capture your findings in a simple way that you can call upon when needed.

As you review your results, identify four or five key factors that are the most important considerations for your upcoming decision. This short list could include a combination of insights about your interests, personality, strengths, values, or other aspects of yourself, or they could draw from one of these areas.

As you move forward, consider these factors as your “filters” for evaluating options to decide how well they suit you.