In order to develop a career that really suits you, it’s important to have a basic knowledge of your key strengths. Unlike skills or knowledge you can acquire through education, your strengths are more basic talents. For the most part you were born with them. You can certainly continue to develop new talents, but in the area of your strengths you have an almost unfair advantage.

Your strengths are things that come naturally and easily to you. Your brain is just wired to be good at them. You couldn’t really teach someone to be as good as you are unless they’re predisposed to have a strength in that area.

Assess your strengths

There are many tests you can take to help assess your personal strengths. The one I recommend most is the Strengths Finder Test, which can be accessed online with a key from the books Now, Discover Your Strengths or Strengths Finder 2.0. The test helps you identify your top 5 strengths with an emphasis on career-related abilities.

I took this test more than a year ago. The results for my top 5 strengths were, in order:

1. Strategic - good at strategic thinking and planning.
2. Input - can efficiently process and integrate large amounts of information.
3. Learner - good at acquiring new knowledge and skills.
4. Focus - able to concentrate well and tune out distractions.
5. Significance - drawn to work on important things and avoid succumbing to trivialities.

I wasn’t surprised by these results. My strengths are predominantly mental as opposed to social or emotional.

Understand your strengths

Once you assess your strengths, it’s important to understand what they mean on a practical level. What kinds of tasks are well-suited to you? What kinds of tasks are a struggle for you?

Because of my strengths, I’m very good at understanding and working with abstract concepts. Contradictory or ambiguous information doesn’t faze me. I see patterns where others see only complexity. I’m also very good at making intelligent, strategically sound decisions. This way of thinking comes naturally to me. I don’t really know how I do it.

Apply your strengths

You’ll be happiest working in a career that allows you to take advantage of your strengths on a daily basis. This will enable you to make a significant contribution to your field.

Based on my strengths, an ideal career for me would be one that leverages my strategic thinking ability and has me working on complex and meaningful challenges, especially in a field that people find complicated or confusing. This suggests I could perform well as an entrepreneur, business consultant, writer, psychologist, designer, criminal profiler!, and many other possibilities.

Similarly, my core strengths also allow me to rule out careers that wouldn’t fit me too well, such as a professional athlete or nightclub manager.

I suggest you take at least one assessment test to gain clarity about your in-born strengths. Working from your strengths will help you (1) be far more productive, (2) get better results, (3) contribute more value, (4) attract higher compensation, (5) enjoy your work, and (6) experience greater fulfillment.

If you’d like to share other strength assessment tests you’ve found helpful, please share them in the forums.

Choosing a career that won't get out-sourced to India would also be a plus.

OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is soooooo funny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Keeps getting better!

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please

Fact: You don't know me, therefore how can you possibly put me on the right path for a career?

Some things just don't work for some people.

Just to add, it is great that you are giving advice. However, like I said sometimes things just don't apply to certain people.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Subjective to the nature of the situation, people, and environment.

The truth can be distorted halfway across the world and become an entirely different truth by the time it lands where it should be.

I'm hyped up on Red Bull!

For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.

And I believe in not having my job shipped over to some third-world country so some corporate moron can pocked even MORE money at my expense. But that ain't likely to happen now, ain't it?

..i took a similar test and these were my top five:

1.strategic..can strategically manipulate quarters into shot glasses by bouncing them off tables..

2.input:when having sex would rather be putting it in then pulling it out.

3.learner:willing to learn new sexual positions with hot secretaries working in office.

4.focus.if you dont focus we wont foc you.

5.significance.drawn to work by pay check ,while day dreaming of having sex with hot secretaries that work in the office...


... jk

Well, I believe in anarchy. I guess we are completly different people, so, again, what works for you simply will not work for me.

The villains of the outsourcing saga are a) the Americans (natch!), b) the British (they ran India for a couple of centuries, remember, so colonialism has got to have something to do with it), and c) the capitalists who set the outsourcing system in motion. The result: wage-exploited, culturally rootless (because they're semi-Americanized) Indians, jobless Americans (although that's not so true anymore in the current surging economy), and a lot of air that's unfit to breathe and water that's unfit to drink--if you can find it.

But I thought: What about American white-collar workers themselves, who are often so maleducated these days that they can't, or won't, do the jobs that Indians are supposedly taking from them for a tenth of their salaries? The outsourcing company that is the focus of Kate's story, a firm called Office Tiger in Chennai, was set up only six years ago by a pair of Harvard Business school grads with investment-banking jobs on Wall Street who noticed that their firms’ lackadaisical Manhattan-based clerical workforces couldn't turn out the letter-perfect documents that Wall Street operations typically need to produce at top speed. Kate writes:

"It had become apparent to [Office Tiger's eventual founders] that not every typist and copyist working the midnight shift in their investment banks--the moonlighting actor, the artist with the ring in his nose--was putting his heart, soul, and syntactical memory into completing the PowerPoint presentations that needed to be done, perfectly, by morning."

Kate also describes a typical U.S. end-user of Office Tiger services: a 43-year-old man with a bachelor's degree who lacks the basic writing skills to enable him to update his resume! The guy has to go to a copy shop, which in turn outsources the work to a Hindu "document specialist" in Chennai for typying, formatting, and proofreading.

Once, of course, American clerical workers equipped with a few business and English courses from high school knew how to turn out crisp, perfectly spelled and punctuated documents that satisfied the most exacting of bosses. But now, high school (and grade school) English teachers see their mission as helping their students be "creative." Students work on their inner poet when it might be more useful for them to work on their inner sentence-diagrammer.

India, however, thanks to those dreadful British colonialists, has a superb, old-fashioned, English language-based education system in which students still learn the essentials of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And it turns out that those skills are highly marketable--as they would be in the United States if anyone still had them. India is also a desperately poor country, which America is not, so it is not surprising that job-starved workers there covet and strive to excel at low-paying clerical positions that many Americans today disdain and perform poorly.

Kate's article is replete with nostalgia for lost village ways in India. That's all well and good--I think traditional Indian culture is wonderful in many ways myself, and the price of modernity for any society is high--but a viable economy based on simple ways and agriculture disappeared years ago in India, just as it did in the West. The options for a place like India are two: a xenophobic command-society folk-museum in which the inhabitants tend their quaint looms and grind along in poverty (a favorite modus operandi of India's socialist governments past and present), or to have what India has now, which at least gives the inhabitants a chance to work at jobs whose wages look good to them. A few years ago I saw one of the famous Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's last movies, made during the 1970s. Its protagonist was a highly educated young man whose sole source of income was peddling packages of typing paper on the street. Is this what we really want for India?

In any event, outsourcing to India may look cheap because the wages there are rock-bottom by U.S. standards. But when you factor in the set-up costs and what you have to pay to keep a middleman like Office Tiger profitable, it may not be so cheap after all.


Nonetheless, given the way the American education establishment has both failed to prepare a competent U.S. workforce and taught it to look down its nose at clerical jobs, outsourcing may be the only way that U.S. businesses, from investment banks to humble copy shops, can get the work done.

Sounds an awful lot like world takeover...careful, the US has fine tuned that art.

When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent

Don't worry Bro, Obama thinks we Americans are arrogant too. Unfortunately, I think people like him and that beleive that can kiss my Star Spangle Bannered Ass!

And yet... with our failure to create a prepared workforce, it STILL takes an AMERICAN worker to train the "better trained" foreign workforce. I KNOW this is true as I've had to do this exact thing, as have several friends I have here in mingle2- in fact, one of my friends is flying out to India in a matter of weeks to train workers there how to do HER job.

Sorry pal, but your argument has holes you can drive a truck through- all this "globalization" nonsense is nothing more than an attempt at the corporate world to exploit more and more people who will work for less and less money.