Career decision personality tests are typically used to compare personalities against work and workplaces. They are one of a group of career decision tests.
A personality is 'the complex of all the attributes - behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental - that characterise a unique individual', or 'the enduring patterns of perceiving, thinking about and relating to the environment and oneself'.
When you think about yourself, you have your own particular personality. The idea behind the career decision personality tests is to establish what this personality is, and then suggest careers that are aligned with it.
Many people, however, when they're considering a career change, there is typically something about their personality they'd like to change as well. Someone who is highly strung may want to be more placid. Someone who is shy and retiring may be really striving to be more outgoing.
But finding a career that is aligned with the old personality is simply going to hold you back!
The trick here is to consider those 'enduring patterns'. Because for most people, these patterns are running them. The individual does not have the decision making skills to choose when to run the pattern. In other words, they seem to have little choice about who they are and how they respond to the world.
I know it's a radical approach , but what about making the decision to first be the person you want to be, and then making your career change decision?
If what you want is to continue being who you are right now, and find something that's aligned with that, then career decision personality tests are the way to go.
Two widely used career decision personality tests are the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. The Myers Briggs indicator has also being overlaid on decision making and can be used to predict decision making styles.
These career decision personality tests are useful as a guide to where you are right now. Sometimes people go, 'Oh yeah, that's me!' and sometimes they don't actually like the results because they would rather think of themselves as different to how they are. More evidence for my point above!
The difficulty with these categorizations is that sometimes people consider that this is who they are. It can sometimes be used as a way to not take responsibility for their actions. Or even worse, not to do the things they really want to do because they won't make their own decisions...