IT Career Assessment Tool
The IT assessment tool is designed to help individuals who are planning the next steps of an information technology career. Professionals working in technical fields often find it difficult to distinguish their capabilities without direct links to technology. This assessment overcomes that obstacle by gathering information about their motivations, skills, talents, personality and organizational preferences that connect to their roles and responsibilities in information technology. This tool has the flexibility to be used as an overall IT assessment or as a drill down into specific areas such as business intelligence, data management, data integration, etc. Of the five sections, only the skills inventory needs to be changed to a particular IT specialization.
Information is captured in easy to use formats that can be readily evaluated and used as the source for social network profiles, resumes, web sites, visual CVs, and career planning. The assessment creates an opportunity for open dialog that leads to informative and productive discussions. The act of completing the assessment questions is an introspective experience, and the process of reviewing the results leads to personal insight. In total, the experience helps the professional to fully express what they do well and why they do it well. The goal is to achieve insight that guides a multi-dimensional and well-balanced career plan or job search – one that looks beyond compensation to examine all aspects of work-related rewards, satisfaction, and fulfillment.
MOTIVATIONS
The motivation section has two parts: change and opportunity. The change assessment examines what you’d like to move from and the opportunity assessment examines what you’d like to move to. The responses can be evaluated and discussed at the individual row level, the summary level and in combination. Making a career change can have unexpected and sometimes undesirable consequences. It is beneficial to understand motivations, both positive and negative. Only then can you be aware of in terms of what you may lose as well as what you may gain.
SKILLS
The skills inventory is representative of a broad range of IT skills, but is not intended to be an exhaustive list. In a rapidly changing field such as IT, a robust and representative list serves the purpose well. The skills assessment rates both level-of-skill and level-of-interest to derive a combined score for each item in the skills inventory. With this approach we can identify: 1) areas where there is high skill but low interest; 2) areas where there is high interest but low skill; and 3) an overall skills index that quantifies skill level in each of ten distinct IT job categories. Collectively these provide the insight that is needed to focus on the right kinds of jobs, and to achieve positive change by knowing both what you do want to do and what you don’t want to do.
TALENTS
The talents section is designed for personal brainstorming. Collecting gut-level responses, it first gathers preferred words and then preferred combinations of words. Calculations in the spreadsheet parse out the most desirable words to create a list of nouns and verbs that can be combined into sentences to describe natural talents. Talent brainstorming discovers the things that we do intuitively, naturally, and well in both work and personal lives. The language in this assessment is crafted to align with IT so the most relevant talents can be brought to the surface. Talents, interests, and skills have a natural affinity, so this activity is particularly useful to discover the right insights to describe an individual as a unique and valuable IT professional.
PERSONALITY AND PREFERENCES
This section focuses on language that accurately describes an individual’s characteristics and personality. The multi-dimensional assessment examines three distinct aspects of personality and related behavioral traits. How I Think – identifies desired communication style and method of processing information. How I Act – identifies responses to the environment, and evaluation and decision-making behaviors. How I Work – identifies the kinds of activity and working style preferences and behaviors.
ORGANIZATION AND RESPONSIBILITIES
This assessment examines and profiles affinity for work in various kinds of IT organizations with differences in scope and responsibilities. Information Technology work typically segments into three levels – program, project, and operations – with each having its own distinct rewards and challenges. Understanding individual preferences and tendencies helps to align a job search or career plan with the right kinds of work. This is a critical aspect of the overall assessment goal – a balanced career plan with attention to all dimensions of the individual.
