Personal Values
Your Personal Assessment - Part 3

Awareness of personal values will guide your life decisions and ensure a good fit between you and your career.

Organisations are increasingly looking at values to ensure alignment between your values and their culture. Many of my career coaching clients have realised the importance of investigating a company's culture and values before simply taking a job that's offerred to them. It's about ensuring satisfaction and contentment at work.

Aligning your values and career makes finding the right career a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ experience. You are being honest about what's important to you and are not trying to be something other than who you are.

I like to think of personal values as a compass that guides behaviour and impacts on your life choices by operating as a decision-making frame of reference.

This page on personal values is part of a 4-part assessment designed to help you learn more about yourself (and apply this knowledge to aspects of your life, such as finding a career).

The four parts of your Personal Assessment are:

1. Your Basic Life Skills
2. The Abilities and Aptitude test
3. Discover your Values (this page)
4. Your Personality profiles

When you've finished the personal values complete the other assessments. When you're done you'll know a lot more about yourself. You can apply this knowledge to choosing a career or finding the right career if that is your aim.

Ready? Let's start.

I'm going to suggest two ways to go about determining your values. First is an exercise working through a list of values. Second is an excellent online Career Values Scale that's easy to complete, provides excellent guidance and costs...nothing! (I always like that!)

Values Assessment - Part 1

Use the table below to start discovering your values. Run through the personal values listed and write down a list of those that are really important to you.

Which values are important for you and guide you in your life?

Are there any other values that are not in the list but you think are important to you? Add these to your list.

Want to print it out? Download this personal values worksheet and work with it when you're ready. It's free.

If you have a long list of values (more than 10) try and remove half of them, leaving you with a shorter list of high priority values.

Next, take your list and prioritise the top 3 values, and the top 5 values. Now you have a good idea of the values that are really important to you.

Take action, and spend some time this week becoming aware of how you put these values into practice. Or choose two of those in your top 5, write them down, and focus on putting them into practice this week.

Values Assessment - Part 2

The Career Values Scale is an effective method to assess your values.

There's no charge for the test - it's straight forward and takes about 10 minutes to complete. In return you'll get a mini report that adds value to part 1 of this assessment.

You can buy an extended report for detailed feedback on your values as they relate to areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction at work. This is optional although I believe the report offers excellent value - it includes exercises to help you focus on achieving a balanced career.

Access the Career Values Scale here. Sign in with an email address and a password and invest in yourself. (I've never had unwanted advertising or email after signing in to this test).

There are two other excellent no charge, no obligation assessments linked to the Career Values Scale that are useful to complete.

Use the Personality Index and Career Interest Profiler to build a more complete personal picture. I found them all very accurate with enough information to make me think about my personal development and what's important for me at work.

When you've finished the personal values assessment choose the next assessment (personality profiles) from the list below.

1. Basic Life Skills
2. The Abilities and Aptitude test
3. Discover your Values (this page)
4. Personality profiles

I'm busy preparing your next assessment. See you there!

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