Beyond the Quiz: Why Career Assessments Can't Tell You Everything

Over the past few decades, personality assessments have become an increasingly familiar part of career development. More recently, they've been joined by a new generation of AI-powered career tools and apps that promise to help you discover the work you're "meant" to do.

Many of these tools are genuinely impressive.

Some use personality profiles. Others focus on strengths, interests or values. Newer platforms combine these with artificial intelligence, labour market information and sophisticated matching algorithms to suggest occupations you may never have considered. Applications such as Apt, along with AI tools such as ChatGPT, can generate ideas, compare career pathways, explain qualifications and even help you prepare applications for specific roles.

I think these developments are enormously valuable, and very worth exploring. They can broaden your thinking, introduce possibilities you hadn't considered, and save hours of research. Used thoughtfully, they make career exploration far more accessible than it was even a few years ago.

Yet despite all these advances, many people still arrive at the same place.

They've gathered plenty of information about themselves. They've explored occupations that appear to fit their personality or strengths. They may even have a list of careers that all seem perfectly reasonable.

And yet the question remains:

"How do I know which one is truly mine?"

The difficulty is that the question was never simply, "Which careers might suit me?" At a  deeper level, the search was actually for work that gives meaningful expression to the concerns, motivations and ways of contributing that are uniquely yours. That kind of recognition is unlikely to emerge from an assessment, an algorithm, or a list of suggested occupations alone.

Information and meaning are different things

Most career tools - whatever combination of personality, strengths, interests or artificial intelligence they're based on - are designed to recognise patterns across large numbers of people. You answer questions, describe your preferences or upload information about your experience, and the system compares your responses with those of thousands or even millions of others. From those comparisons it suggests occupations that are likely to be a good fit.

It's an extraordinary capability, and one that will only become more sophisticated in the years ahead.

Career counselling, however, begins with a different question. Rather than asking, "What careers tend to suit people like you?", it asks:

"What if your life has been organised around something important all along - you just haven't had the opportunity to recognise it yet?"

That question shifts the conversation away from finding the "right" occupation and towards something deeper: understanding the unique pattern that has quietly shaped a person's life.

Personality tells us something important - but not everything

One of the strengths of personality assessments is that they help us understand ourselves as we are now. They may describe how we make decisions, solve problems, respond to change or relate to other people. They often provide language that explains why some environments feel energising while others leave us exhausted. That kind of insight can be genuinely useful, and many people benefit from it.

The difficulty arises when we expect personality alone to answer questions about vocation.

Imagine three people who receive almost identical personality profiles. All enjoy working with people. All score highly on empathy. All value creativity and learning.

One becomes an outstanding teacher. Another finds deep satisfaction as a physiotherapist. A third discovers that the work they love most is leading teams through organisational change.

Their personalities may share important similarities. Their lives have taken those qualities in very different directions.

Understanding that difference requires something more than categorisation.

It requires context.

Every life has its own logic

The approach I use is based on the idea that our lives contain a coherence that isn't immediately obvious while we're living them.

Most of us experience life one day at a time. We remember individual jobs, important relationships, successes, disappointments and turning points, but we rarely have the opportunity to stand back and look at the whole landscape.

When we do, something interesting begins to happen.

Experiences that once seemed unrelated start to connect. Interests that appeared to come and go reveal themselves as remarkably persistent. Certain concerns, values or ways of contributing seem to reappear throughout life, even when the settings have changed completely.

It's as though there has been an organising principle quietly at work beneath the surface - one that has influenced many of our decisions without our ever fully recognising it.

I don't mean that our lives follow a predetermined script. Life is far too unpredictable for that.

Rather, I mean that each person seems to carry a unique set of questions, concerns, and motivations that gradually seek expression through their work, relationships and choices. Recognising that pattern can be a surprisingly powerful experience - it allows people to understand their past in a new way while also seeing their future with greater clarity.

Stories reveal what categories cannot

This is one reason I continue to value conversation over assessment.

Personality tools are excellent at describing characteristics. Stories reveal significance.

Memories of people who helped shape who you are. A project you still remember years later. A recurring frustration that has followed you through several different jobs. A moment that left you thinking, "This feels like the kind of work I want to spend more of my life doing."

Seen individually, these moments can seem almost incidental. Taken together, they can reveal the deeper pattern that has been quietly organising a person's life all along.

That isn't information an assessment has somehow missed. It's a different kind of understanding altogether.

Working with AI rather than against it

AI is becoming extraordinarily good at helping us explore possibilities – introducing occupations we've never heard of, explaining pathways into new industries, comparing qualifications, and evaluating practical options. Those are tasks at which technology excels, and I expect they'll become even better over time.

The role of career counselling is different.

Its purpose is not simply to generate more options, but to help make sense of which options resonate with the deeper pattern of a particular life. Once that pattern begins to emerge, AI often becomes even more useful - it can help explore practical ways in which that unique pattern might find expression in the world.

The two approaches don't compete. They answer different questions.

A broader picture

Over the years I've become less interested in helping people find the perfect career and more interested in helping them understand the life they have already been living.

When that understanding begins to emerge, something subtle changes. Career decisions become less about choosing between unrelated occupations and more about recognising which opportunities allow a person's deeper concerns and values to find their fullest expression. One client described it as finally finding her North Star - not a destination that had been hidden from her, but one she realised she had been quietly moving toward all along.

That's why I still find this work so rewarding.

Not because career counselling has all the answers, but because the process makes visible a pattern that may have been shaping a person's life without ever being fully recognised. When that pattern comes into view, the question of career direction changes - it is no longer simply which option appears suitable, but which direction gives expression to what has mattered all along.