What are Career Aptitude Tests and Should You Take One?

At some point, every student faces the difficult decision of choosing a career. Although your graduate and post-graduate degree have a significant bearing on your employment prospects, how do you choose a job that you would enjoy, or be good at? In fact, are you suited for employment at all, or should you aim to become an entrepreneur? One way to decide on your future career is to take an aptitude test.

What’s an Aptitude Test?

The dictionary definition of the word aptitude is ‘the innate talent or acquired capacity for something’.

An aptitude test evaluates an individual’s inherent ability, skill, or inclination to do a defined task or achieve a goal. Aptitude tests predict a person’s ability to learn or perform a task if he/she is given proper instruction or training. The Myers-Briggs test, one of the most popular aptitude tests, is designed to assess an individual’s cognitive abilities such as perception, intuition, and capacity to feel.

Some common applications of aptitude tests are:

• A test to assess an individual’s aptitude to become an army officer
• A test to assess which graduate course a high-school student should choose
• A test to see which career option is best suited for a fresh graduate.

What Questions do Aptitude Tests Contain?

Aptitude tests are used by academic institutions and employers to evaluate personality traits, interest, values, and, ability, and even work style.  Aptitude tests use different question formats to arrive at the results. Some of these are:

Number questions – Mathematical calculation are performed in most jobs every day, which is why numerical aptitude test is one of the most commonly used formats. Numerical aptitude questions are designed to measure basic mathematic literacy, i.e. the ability to perform mathematical calculations. They also evaluate an individual’s mathematical reasoning, which is the ability to use maths to solve problems and arrive at conclusions.

Verbal questions – Verbal tests evaluate an applicant’s ability to either answer questions based on text provided or to spot the right answer using logical thinking. The applicant may be asked to answer multiple choice or true or false questions based on a passage provided. The questions may also include word analogies and spot the odd one type of questions. Verbal tests are commonly used to assess police officers, firefighters, sales or customer service representatives, as well as administrative staff. These questions are also used for entrance exams for graduate and management programs.

Language skills questions – Language proficiency questions measure the ability of an individual to communicate in written. The focus is on sentence construction, grammar, and general communication skills. English aptitude tests are commonly used for evaluating students applying to graduate and post-graduate students in native English-speaking countries.

Deductive reasoning questions – These questions assess an individual’s logical thinking ability. You are given a set of rules, and asked to draw a conclusion based on numbers, text, or non-verbal cues (e.g. shapes and images). Deductive reasoning is used to evaluate people applying for jobs in Science and IT, Engineering, Software Development and Technical Design.

Spatial reasoning questions: Also known as spatial awareness section, the spatial reasoning section in an aptitude test measures comprehension of two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. Spatial reasoning is used in the military and for technical positions such as engineering, architecture, and design.

Can Aptitude Tests Help You Make the Right Career Choice?

Like them or hate them, aptitude tests are one of the standards used by many companies and academic institutions to evaluate candidates for their suitability to a job or academic course.

A psychometric study of more than 150000 people conducted at the University of Minnesota, revealed that, on an average, people with higher aptitude test scores do perform better on tasks. Of course, for any sample that you take, there will be ‘outliers’, i.e. people who did poorly on the test but performed well at tasks. But, overall, a well-designed aptitude test seems to be a good indicator of an individual’s suitability to a task.

Critics argue that aptitude tests are no longer suited to the new world order, where the ability to take risks, think out of the box, and perform cross-functional tasks, is just as important as the applicant’s qualifications and professional acumen. As per the nay-sayers, aptitude tests put people in neat boxes of what one is and isn’t capable of, but the younger generation is no longer keen on sticking to a job or industry.  And the business world has enough examples of people who have scored well on psychometric tests but failed to find professional success.

The real trick to choosing the right career is being honest in your self-assessment. For instance, answer the following –

• What kind of life do you want yourself? For instance, the level of risk in armed forces is high compared to the risk of employment elsewhere.
• Are your mental, physical, and emotional capabilities suited to the type of careers you are considering? The hospitality and service industry often requires working in night shifts, and may not be ideal if you are not capable of adjusting to the changing work hours.
• What do you value more – money or the ability to work independently?
• Looking back at the last few years of your student life, what courses and experiences did you enjoy the most?

To determine if you are making the right career choice, an internship in the relevant industry will help clarify a few things. Also, reach out to your professional contacts, college alumni or social networks to learn from their real-life professional experiences.

In conclusion, aptitude tests are more suggestive than predictive, and not the ultimate barometer for arriving at a choice of career. While there are other ways to find out more about your future career, an aptitude test can certainly give you a better understanding of your personality and capabilities. Plus, you don’t have to pay for career aptitude test; there are plenty of free aptitude tests available online. So why not give one of these a try?