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.
Take an Assessment
Overview
Usually requiring 1-2 hours of your time, assessments provide relatively quick, detailed, and research-driven methods of collecting information about a specific aspect (or aspects) of yourself. Rather than prescribing your life to you, assessments can provide valuable ways to describe yourself in meaningful ways.
The assessments offered by Career Services are free to all UCSB students (and Alumni within their grace period). They are well-suited for students who are making decisions about academic or career plans. While they can be helpful starting points, they are best weighed alongside additional research and reflection. Because most decisions about academics and careers involve many nuanced factors (e.g., job market fluctuations, financial considerations, and regional trends), assessment results are usually most helpful when incorporated alongside additional tools and resources.
Career Services offers a range of assessments that can give you a better idea about specific aspects of yourself as related to your academic or career planning, including:
- Interests
- Personality
- Strengths
- Values
Typically, these four dimensions are unique aspects that share some overlap; together, they comprise a significant portion of your career identity.
Please note that the assessments we provide do not measure abilities, aptitude, or mental health. For assessments that address these topics, you can consult other campus services at UCSB, such as Counseling and Psychological Services or Student Health.
Assessments We Offer
Here is an overview of the assessments that we recommend.
Career Services has partnered with industry-leading service, Career Dimensions to bring you FOCUS® 2, an online, self-guided, interactive program designed to help you narrow down a choice of college major at UCSB and plan your future career. FOCUS® 2 offers free assessments to help you better understand your interests, personality, strengths, values, and more, to begin exploring your future direction.
The Work Interests Assessment in Focus 2 helps quickly assess your interests within several broad work themes. By matching your interests with possible occupations, Focus 2 provides valuable information about what is most important to you.
The Values Assessment in Focus 2 helps you identify occupations that are compatible with your work values. Your work values are job-related beliefs and ideas that are important to you.
The Personality Assessment in Focus 2 helps you better understand your personality type and how this relates to different occupations.
The Skills Assessment in Focus 2 will help you identify occupations that match your skills profile. Skills can be learned or be the result of natural abilities and talents for doing certain tasks. It is important to explore occupations that you have the ability to do or plan on becoming more proficient in.
Instructions:
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Watch the FOCUS 2 Career Tour (9:30 minutes)
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Register for a new FOCUS® 2 account online with your UCSB email address and the access code gaucho
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Complete each of the assessments as prompted (allocate 45-60 minutes)
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Instantly explore your results through individual and combined reports available within the FOCUS® 2 platform
Note: FOCUS 2 is web-optimized, so you can easily run it in a browser on your mobile device.
The Strong Interest Inventory® (SII) assesses your interests within several broad work themes. By matching your interests with professionals who have similar interests and enjoy what they do, the SII can be helpful for information about what you “like” and “dislike.”
Recommended for:
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Clarifying your interests (i.e., what you like, enjoy, or appreciate)
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Identifying majors, fields, industries, and occupations that match your interests
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Receiving a thorough report of information about your “likes” and “dislikes”
Instructions:
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Visit Career Services drop-in hours and request to register for the SII
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Follow the instructions provided via email from VitaNavis to take your assessment online (allocate 45-60 minutes)
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Sign up for a 60-minute time slot to receive your results and have them interpreted at Career Services
Contact Us: For assistance with the SII, visit Career Services drop-in hours.
Your personality is one of many factors that guide your behavior. Your actions are also influenced by your environment, your experiences, and your individual goals. Understanding your personality is meant to inspire personal growth and improved understanding of yourself. 16Personalities allows you to discover your personality utilizing the familiar letters of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) along with the Big Five personality traits model.
Recommended for:
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Developing yourself through personal growth and self-reflection
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Identifying career values and paths based on your personality type
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Understanding workplace habits and environments you would thrive in
Instructions:
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Click the button below to create a 16Personalities account using any email address of your preference
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Complete the assessment online by following the prompts on the screen
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Instantly review your results through an online report
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Request an appointment with Career Services to explore your personality further (optional, but recommended)
Values- money, location, balance, work environment, and much more- make up a key aspect of your decisions. The Life Values Inventory is an assessment that can help you identify the most important things to you and clarify the deeper motivations that drive your efforts.
Recommended for:
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Clarifying what you care about most
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Learning about your most significant needs in a career
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Considering the influence of your upbringing, identity, and culture
Instructions:
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Click the button below to create a Life Values Inventory account using any email address of your preference
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Complete the assessment online by following the prompts on the screen
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Instantly review your results through an online report
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Request an appointment with Career Services to explore your personality further (optional, but recommended)
Did You Know?
Assessments do not usually present the final option that people end up pursuing.
Assessments provide you with information about a specific aspect of yourself, which is best weighed alongside your additional research and reflection about other aspects. Because most decisions about academics and careers involve many nuanced factors, assessment results should be reviewed holistically.
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