University of Manchester Careers Blog

We know it’s hard to find time to think about the future when you’re so busy dealing with weekly readings, imminent essay deadlines and the like, so we’ve come up with five “5 Minute Fixes” that you can easily fit into your day to help you start thinking about life after uni.

5 Minute Fixes: Work out your strengths and weaknesses with an online personality questionnaire

If you were asked in an interview what your biggest weakness was, what would you say? It can be tricky to admit we’re not great at some things and harder again to articulate to employers how you can overcome these weaknesses.

Personality quizzes and questionnaires are great for helping you identify what you’re good at and getting you to think about where there’s room for improvement. Knowing more about your strengths and what tasks you do well can help you work out what sort of jobs would suit you and might appeal to your interests.

These are more for fun:

• The Myers Briggs Personality Test – I swear by this test. I found it to be an eerily accurate reflection of me, my motivations and what makes me tick. Since taking this, I’ve become more aware of my strengths and how I can play to them, and of my weaknesses and how I can combat them.
• The Richard Step Test – Provides an overview of your strengths and identifies your weakest trait.
• The Pymetrics Test – Play a series of games in order to determine your strengths and personality traits. The test then recommends careers that your traits might predispose you to.

Although some of these questionnaires do take longer than five minutes, I found I could fly through them pretty quickly.

If you’re looking for something a little more “official”, you can access similar questionnaires through the university that will give you a pdf report of your results to download and keep:

• The Type Dynamics Indicator – Looks at your preferences and style according to four different dimensions of personality.
• The Careers Interest Inventory – Identifies career areas that may interest you.
• The Learning Styles Indicator – Looks at the way you approach learning.

The Careers Service also offers the My Future – Next Steps questionnaire, which you can take again and again over the academic year to see how you’ve developed and decide what actions and steps you could take next.

Check out our other 5 Minute Fixes.