Motivational Assessment: Unlock Your True Passion For A Successful Career

About the Author: Alyssa Ammirato is a freelance writer that has an unmatched passion for writing. When not writing for fun, she writes professionally for College.com, CareerMotivations.com and several other online educational resources.

 

An unrelenting reality of life is the need to work for a living. The hope is to find happiness in doing so. In an unforgiving economy, now more than ever a successful career is essential to personal freedom. But a problem arises when one’s educational paths are abandoned and thus a person’s potential is not realized.  This is often due to an unidentified or misguided awareness of one’s true career motivation. Motivational assessments, which identify personal career related motivations, interests and goals, have shown great success in preventing such derailments.

Children are told as early as pre-school that when they grow up, they can be whatever they want to be. When a three-year-old announces a life-long dream to be a princess, an affectionate smile is the appropriate response. But for a college-bound student, we hope there’s a more realistic and heartfelt expression of professional goals. All too often, thanks to fleeting trends in pop culture, parental pressures, and unreliable information, students project their futures through rose-colored lenses of TV dramas, the assumed fanfare of doing what dad or mom does or the dream of joining the family business.

Presumably, when college-bound students sift through the seemingly unlimited combinations of schools, majors, degrees and career paths, they’re outlining the rest of their lives: they’re taught that hard work and a college degree prepares for a dependable professional future. But far too many young adults plan for such a future without enough life experience and personal understanding to fully grasp the implications of their academic decisions.  In addition, the big pictureexpectation of a career often blinds one from understanding of the actual duties, tasks & responsibilities actually associated with that job. Finally, many don’t even have the understanding of which tasks, responsibilities they actually are motivated to do.

The problem is that too often, people head off to college without a clear career strategy. When they finally graduate, they don’t have a clue what career they are best suited for.These interesting facts about students demonstrate there’s a lot of uncertainty about their educational and career choices:

  • One out of five students change their major between admission and first day of class
  • Nearly three out of five students change majors at least twice before they graduate
  • Students graduating from high school today will change jobs 10 to 15 times over the course of their working lives and change careers as many as three or four times.

A career test can save literally thousands of dollars in educational and career missteps by helping students focus their studies on coursework that will help prepare them for a career that’s right for them.

Understanding yourself as a student is key to successful learning. Understanding your personal values, motivations & Interests is key to successful achieving. At 18, few students have enough knowledge of their personal motivations and “real-world” realities to make informed choices for the next decade. When they embark on paths chosen at the suggestion of others, or make their own guess based on limited information, the risk of failure in academics or business spikes and drop-out rates, plan re-writes and wasted spending & student loans increase.

3 comments on “Motivational Assessment: Unlock Your True Passion For A Successful Career”

  1. I agree with this, I wish I had taken an assessment like that before I selected my college major. I ended up wasting 2 years and over $20,000 by the time I realized I had little interest in that area…

  2. Very important issue indeed. It would be useful to know where one can take a motivational assessment. Or is it a personal process one has to undergone by himself/herself?

  3. This is a reality that students and parents are facing these days. Proper guidance by those who truly understand students’ situations will greatly help. Truth be told, parents are not always in the know of what their children should take for a future career and they tend to misguide their offspring. It is great that there are career tests and counselors who can help students discover or understand a suitable degree for them.


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