Are you on the right track?

How to find the career that fits your personality.

If you've finished your A-levels and have absolutely no idea what to do next, you're not alone," says Sheridan Hughes, an occupational psychologist at Career Analysts, a career counselling service. "At 18, it can be very difficult to know what you want to do because you don't really know what you're interested in."

Careers guidance, adds Alexis Hallam, one of her colleagues, is generally poor and "people can end up in the wrong job and stay there for years because they're good at something without actually enjoying it".

To discover what people are good at, and more fundamentally, what they will enjoy doing, Career Analysts give their clients a battery of personality profile questionnaires and psychometric tests. An in-depth interview follows, in which the test results are discussed and different career paths and options are explored with the aid of an occupational psychologist.

Career Analysts, like Career Psychology, another London-based career counselling firm, offers guidance to everyone from teenagers to retirees looking for a new focus in life. The service sounded just what I needed. Dividing my time as I do between teaching and freelance journalism, I definitely need advice about consolidating my career.

Being too ancient for Career Analysts' student career guidance option, and not, unfortunately, at the executive level yet, I plumped for the career management package. This is aimed at people who are established in their jobs and who either want a change or some advice about planning the next step in their careers.

Having filled in a multitude of personality indicator questionnaires at home, I then spent a rather gruelling morning being aptitude-tested at Career Analysts' offices.

The tests consisted of logical reasoning followed by verbal, numerical mechanical and spatial aptitude papers. Logical reasoning required me to pick out the next shape in a sequence of triangles, squares and oblongs. I tried my best but knew that it was really a lost cause. I fared rather better when it came to verbal aptitude - finding the odd one out in a series of words couldn't be simpler. My complacency was short-lived, however, when I was confronted with images of levers and pulleys for the mechanical aptitude papers. My mind went blank. I had no idea what would happen to wheel X when string Y was pulled.

At home, filling in questionnaires, I had been asked to give my instinctive reaction (not an over-considered one) to statements like: "It bothers me if people think I'm being odd or unconventional", or, "I like to do my planning alone without interruptions from others."

I was asked to agree or disagree on a scale of one to five with: "I often take on impossible odds", or, "It is impossible for me to believe that chance or luck plays an important role in my life." I was told to indicate how important I considered status to be in a job, and how important money and material benefits.

The questions attempt to construct a picture of the complete individual. Using aptitude tests alongside personality profiling, occupational psychologists will, the theory goes, be able to guide a client towards a rewarding, fulfilling career.

Some questions are as straightforward as indicating whether or not you would enjoy a particular job. Designing aircraft runways? Preparing legal documents? Playing a musical instrument? Every career going makes an appearance and, as I was shown later, the responses tend to form a coherent pattern.

Having completed my personality and aptitude tests, I sat down with Sherridan Hughes, who asked me fairly searching personal and professional questions. What do my parents and siblings do for a living? Why had I chosen to do an English degree? "I need to get a picture of you as a person and how you've come to be who you are," she explained. "What we do works because it's a mixture of science and counselling. We use objective psychometric measures to discover our clients' natural strengths and abilities and then we talk to them about what they want from life."
There were no real surprises in my own test results, nor in the interview that followed it. "We're interested in patterns," Mrs Hughes explained, "and the pattern for you is strongly verbal and communicative." This was putting it rather kindly. I had come out as average on the verbal skills test and below average in logic, numerical, perceptual and mechanical reasoning. My spatial visualisation was so bad it was almost off the scale. "A career in cartography navigation, tiling or architecture would not be playing to your strengths," she said delicately.

Mrs Hughes encouraged me to expand the writing side of my career and gave me straightforward, practical suggestions as to how I could go about it. "Widen the scope of your articles, self-help for example," she said. "You could develop an interest in medical and psychological fields." These latter, she said, would sit comfortably with an interest in human behaviour indicated on my personality-profiling questionnaires. She suggested that I consider writing e-learning content for on-line courses, an avenue that would never have occurred to me.

Psychometric testing followed by a face-to-face consultation can confirm that the client is essentially following the right career path, or it can suggest a new field of work.

Ben Melton, 20, from Buckinghamshire, was working in a pub and not enjoying it when he went to Career Analysts. "They focused my mind," he said, "and showed me that I wouldn't be happy running my own pub, which I had been considering. They encouraged me to look at careers in electronic media and animation."

Ben is now enrolled on a BTEC in e-media and feels that he has finally found his niche. "The careers advice I got at school wasn't at all helpful," he said. "Psychometric testing has put me on the right track."

Frances Childs