Socrates once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Yet sometimes it seems that Americans are obsessed with self-examination and constant change. Individuals once spent an entire lifetime with a single employer, but most people today evaluate their career and lifelong goals every few years. It’s common to leapfrog from opportunity to opportunity and to re-make a professional identity several times over.

If you’re entering college and are perplexed about your future goals, join the club. Even as graduates enter the workplace, they continue to assess their skills and dreams to find lasting success and happiness.

Psychologists, educators, and employers have developed a battery of tests that measure your likes and dislikes, your aspirations and aptitudes. A dizzying range of online personality and career assessment tests are free for the taking to help you discover your heart’s desire or make mid-life course corrections.

Some help you find out whether you’d rather pick flowers in Holland in the summer or drive an 18-wheel truck in blizzard conditions along the Al-Can highway. Employers administer assessments to see how well you’ll do in a team environment, if you can take direction, supervise others, or prefer to sit alone in a cubicle listing to your iPod.

You’ll find dozens–if not hundreds–of online career and personality tests. Many are free, while some companies charge money. Most offer a free topside overview, with more complex analyses available for a price. Beware, however, for aptitude assessment tests are not always as advertised.Measuring the Tests that Measure You

No one likes being lumped into a career or personality group. In America, especially, we’re individuals to the very end. It helps to think of online test results as an effort to spot your tendencies, rather than making your choices for you. Above all else, you’ll want to focus your time on tests that rely on time-tested psychological models to drive the assessment. Examine the Web sites you visit for information on the methodology–and eschew tests that are glib, bizarre, or downright flakey.

Let’s look at four standardized aptitude and profile assessments used by professionals.• Myers Briggs Personality Test (MBPT)

The granddaddy of most personality and job assessments, the MBPT is most likely the model behind the tests you’ll discover at online evaluation sites. You’ll be categorized onto one of 16 personality types, based on your responses to questions that evaluate how you deal with life (extroversion vs. introversion), how you process information (sensing vs. intuition), how you make decisions (thinking vs. feeling), and how you organize your life (judging vs. perception).• The Six Factor Personality Questionnaire (SFPQ)

The SFPQ is a well-respected assessment tool that measures six personality factors, with each factor broken into categories that are calculated by 108 Likert questions. Likert questions ask you to identify with a given statement using the following scale–Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neither agree nor disagree, Agree, or Strongly agree.

SFPQ personality factors include Agreeableness, Extraversion, Independence, Openness to Experience, Methodicalness, and Industriousness. A SFPQ test can help you understand your traits with respect to temperament, autonomy, endurance, achievement, logic, and resistance to or acceptance of change.• The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI)

Tests based on the HPI model measure your personality, your traits in respect to on-the-job performance, and your attitude. HPI tests fall into one or more of the following assessment categories–the Hogan Development Survey, Motivation, Values, and Preferences Inventory, and Hogan Personality Inventory.

HPI questions produce personality trait identifiers and motive qualities that can include colorful, dutiful, bold, imaginative, altruistic, power, security, cautious, and excitable. Occupational aptitude measurements rank you in categories that include integrity, leadership ability, initiative, decision-making skills, communication skills, self-esteem, curiosity, sense of responsibility, and creative potential.• Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey (GZTS)

The GZTS is strictly a personality evaluator, used to measure learning potential, possible learning disabilities, personality, and temperament as it applies to the workplace, conflict, and personal relationship skills. Scales measure quantifiable responses to qualities of restraint, emotional stability, objectivity, friendliness, and thoughtfulness.• 16 Personality Factors (16PF)

The 16PF text was created by psychologist Raymond Cattell to measure so-called primary factors that show your tendencies in major assessment categories of warmth, reasoning, emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change, self-reliance, perfectionism, and tension.Beyond the Personality Testing Numbers

You’ll no doubt discover a broad range of online career tests that are based on these highly regarded methodologies. While the governing categories may not be immediately visible, they are there. Instead of dry category breakdowns, you’re more likely to see questions based on the SFPQ model. You’ll be given a direct statement and asked to rank your identification with it. Sample questions/declarations might include:

• I love to work alone.

• I have difficulty reaching decisions.

• I prefer not to always show how I feel.

• I’d rather be a farmer than a stockbroker.

Your responses to these statements translate into raw numbers that fit the 16PF or SFPQ qualities.

If you’re taking a personality or career assessment test online, it’s vital to consider the results as sweeping generalizations about your career or life-goal tendencies that give you guidance but not clear-cut directions. Think of suggested career choices as options, and then see how you respond emotionally to detailed career descriptions you find elsewhere in your search.

As a bonus, a test may reveal broader career fields than you imagined for yourself as well as greater self-wisdom about your likes, dislikes, aptitudes, and skills. Remain open to suggested fields. If a test sends you into unexplored territory and you respond with energy and delight, you may have hit the jackpot.

Caveat emptor–buyer beware. Online career testing is at best uneven and, at worst, misleading marketing junk to promote a paid survey. Don’t take yourself–or the results–too seriously. Before entering personal information other than your email address on an exam site, look for privacy declarations or contact the Webmaster. Before you ante up for extras or detailed analyses, look at the quality and sensibility of your free results.

Any business that fails to take a regular inventory of its assets and deficiencies is doomed to failure. The same can be said for individuals who are committed to using their innate strengths in choosing a career path and improving their lives. Americans are often stuck in the pursuit of “finding themselves”. As a result, they’re suffering from a paralysis of analysis. Fortunately, there are personal assessment tools developed by psychologists to place you in wide categories of human traits, strengths, and weaknesses. Some of the best of these cost-free assessments are available online.

Before taking any of these online assessments, it’s prudent to consider the results you’ll receive as a best-case snapshot of how you fit pre-established categories. Plus, results are based on your intellectual and emotional reactions to the questions and how honest you are in your responses. You’ll profit most by heeding any results with a grain of salt and using your assessment as broad guidelines in career and skill planning.Clickable Tests that Measure How You Tick

Online tests fall into several broad categories. There are skills assessments that evaluate your capabilities in the workplace, asking such questions as, “are you a finisher or do you procrastinate?”. Some tests measure your tendencies and preferences, with such questions as, “Would you rather work a drill press or be a financial planner?”. Still other tests measure your personality tics asking things like, “Do slow drivers bother you?”.

Here are the top-ten tests you’ll find online and their features:

• Big Five Personality Test

• Career Focus 2000 Interest Inventory

• OneNet school-to-work transition assessment instruments

• The 3 Sides of You Self Perception Profiler

• Career Interest Inventory

• Keirsey Temperament Sorter

• Career Zone Assessment Test

• AdvisorTeam Temperament Sorter

• Monster.com Assessment

• Career Link InventoryBig Five Personality Test

The Big Five Personality Test is based on a 1970 measurement test created by researchers from The National Institutes of Health, the University of Oregon, and the University of Michigan. The test asks you to evaluate your own preferences in categories called Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. There is no cost for taking the test.Career Focus 2000 Interest Inventory

In this cost-free test you’ll take stock of your interests in 18 career fields by responding to 180 questions. This is a measurement of interest, rather than aptitude. Would you like to test blood in a laboratory or create a musical score for an orchestra? The test is well-suited for high school and college students, and for adults looking at new career options.OneNet school-to-work

Easily the most comprehensive assessment tool online, OneNet is free to the user. A bank of tests will measure your skill sets, occupational likes and dislikes, and potential career fields that suit your type. The site is sponsored by The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA).The 3 Sides of You Self Perception Profiler

This cost-free test delivers a three-part profile of how you rank in thinking, working, and emoting. Each of the three category tests contain 56 statements that users rank in order of importance or self-identification. For example: “You often feel when something’s wrong, yet seldom speak up about it.” Or, “For you, there’s one best way of doing everything.” At the end, you’ll receive an overview of your personality style.Career Interest Inventory

This free online inventory reveals to the user the career fields that best match their personal interests. The 45 questions ask, “Would you rather be an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency or a plastic surgeon?” Or, “Would you rather be an eye doctor, a poet, or a firefighter?”Keirsey Temperament Sorter

This free, online assessment tool is popular among counseling professionals, Fortune 500 companies, and major universities for measuring career and personality development. The test follows the standardized 16 Myers-Briggs personality assessment categories in accordance with psychological types first described by C. G. Jung. A more-detailed assessment is available for a fee.Career Zone Assessment Test

This free, online measurement tool evaluates your career by work environments and personal preferences. It uses a model based on life themes in six categories: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. By combining your positive choices, the test delivers a range of professions.AdvisorTeam Temperament Sorter

AdvisorTeam’s free test also uses the Keirsey model, helping you to understand your “strengths, motivations, and temperaments.” You’ll answer questions about your behavior, attitudes, and preferences. Do you chat with strangers while waiting on line at the supermarket or do you pace anxiously? What’s more important, your thoughts or your feelings?Monster.com Assessments

One of the Web’s largest job sites offers a free career test based on your personality type. Four questions detail two sets of personality characteristics. You’re asked to honestly describe which set best fits you. You decide if you’re an extrovert or introvert; a thinker or a feeler; judger or perceiver. Questions: Where is your energy naturally directed? What kind of information do you naturally notice and remember? How do you decide or come to conclusions? What kind of environment makes you the most comfortable?Career Link Inventory

This free, online assessment tool helps you take your own inventory in aptitudes, interests, temperaments, physical capacities, working conditions, and career preparation. Do you prefer to work inside or outdoors? Are you stronger in spatial or verbal skills? Would you rather have on-the-job prestige or prefer producing a visible, tangible product?I See Myself Better, Now What?

It’s easy to fall into a pit of extreme emotional reactions or set your goals in stone as a result of your test results. Remember that any results are just guidelines and another tool to give you an additional glimpse of yourself. The tests can be useful if, based on your findings, you establish some career options and objectives with flexibility.

You might consider conducting additional research into what it will take to get into fields that excite you. You could make a pluses and minuses list of the jobs you’re considering. If you’re motivated, develop an action plan and timetable for reaching your goals.