Career profile test – Times are tricky on the employment marketplace nowadays. With the recession entering a couple of years already, job security has reached a new low among both blue and white collar employees, and job fluidity is a desired feature among staff of all stripes. That’s the reason why it is important to take a regular career profile test to ensure you are embarking on a career that will be in demand and will not leave you stranded.
Gone are the days where you could find a job in your early twenties and expect to remain in that job until you retired in your late 50′s.
The retirement age is going up, job security – as I discussed – is going down, and corporations that were once the pillars of the North American economy for years have either gone into chapter eleven bankruptcy or vanished outright. So you must be flexible when taking a career profile test as you will be expected to be astonishing when applying for the career of your dreams. In the words of previous secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, there are no unknown knows – things we all known.
Then there are known unknowns – things we do not know. And then there are unknown unknowns – things we do not know we do not know. This doesn’t just apply to the military, this is applicable to work and the economy as well. A nice example of an unknown unknown would be the technical revolution of the last 15 to 20 years.
A standard education received in the 1980s could not prepare you for a world that gets its news from Facebook and Twitter. Computer languages learned in the 90′s are relics these days. Even the internet as we all know it is at risk of becoming obsolete, with “The Grid” looming in the not-too-distant future.
So you need to ensure to take a career profile test once in a while and ensure your career profile is always current and not expect it to be permanent.
Do yourself a favor and take online classes in various technical fields. Actually go the extra mile at work to expand your resume a bit more, so that if you do have to some day find a new job, you won’t be shoe horned or pigeonholed into something that doesn’t have a great life expectancy.
There are of course a wide variety of online services to help you take a career profile test and help you to maintain an optimal profile.
A quick google search can turn up advisors, online universities, anecdotes and colleges that specialize in continual education, and options above and beyond everything just mentioned. This is definitely the best place to start with your search.
If you don’t find a career profile test that is exactly what you’re looking for, the next step would probably be to find a career profile specialist. Much like a college adviser, but these types of individuals function in a professional, for-profit capacity. They will have the connections and the knowledge you need to upgrade your own profile, and are a resource to make use of.