Workplace

The Career Decoder Quiz unlocks your professional strengths and potential. I'm going to walk you through three ways you can use your results to improve your own career happiness, success, and satisfaction.

I built the Career Decoder Quiz back in 2015 and, as of today, hundreds of thousands of people have taken the quiz. When I first shared it with our members and followers, I got a comment from someone on LinkedIn with a PhD in psychology who said their results were spot-on accurate. It truly made my day because I always knew that this information was important and accurate but it's very validating when you hear other individuals saying that as well.

How To Use The Career Decoder Quiz To Unlock Professional Success

The Career Decoder Quiz is all about your workplace personas. Your workplace personas explain how you like to add value and how you like to create value and results for your employer when you're doing work. And this is important to understand because you're not an employee. You're a business-of-one, and you're selling your services to the employer. You want to be able to sell services that you enjoy providing. That's how you find satisfaction in your career.

I've worked with thousands of people over the last 20 years. I've been a career coach for a long time, and I know that the number one reason people are so unhappy is that they're not internally motivated by their work. The technical term is "intrinsic motivation." It means it's work you desire to do and that's exactly what the career decoder results reveal. You're going to feel more satisfied naturally when you're doing the kind of work your results say you should do.

When we work with people inside the Work It DAILY platform, when our career coaches help our members, what we normally find is that they're doing work that is not leveraging their top two or three workplace personas. The Career Decoder Quiz is going to tell you you're top personas. When you get your results, anything that scores 20% or higher means it's a strength of yours. It's a persona that you prefer to leverage. Some people only have one. Some people have a couple of them. But you can't be all eight, so you're going to see what you prefer to do and how you prefer to deliver that value.

The first way (and probably the most important way) you should be using the results of the Career Decoder Quiz is to get very clear on the kind of work you want to do.

We had a client take the Career Decoder Quiz. He was a very successful executive. In his current role, he was known as an Optimizer. (That's one of the eight workplace personas.) He was very good at looking at problems in the company and fixing them. But he wasn't fulfilled in this work. When he took our quiz, it turned out that his top three workplace personas were Mentor, Visionary, and Educator.

What he preferred to do was coach others. He preferred to share a vision, help people connect the dots, and see things that they couldn't see on their own. He also wanted to close gaps in knowledge and information.

So what we did was work together to quantify his skills and abilities in these three areas—the ways he preferred to work—and then he went to his leadership team and expressed the fact that he really wanted to find work within the organization that allowed him to leverage these three areas. And, lo and behold, the executive team said to him, "We've been waiting for you to say this." He was shocked. They were very happy with him in the Optimizer role and he seemed to be happy in the Optimizer role, so why would they've changed things? It wasn't until he expressed his desire to do work that was in line with how he felt satisfaction that he was able to get results.

I see this every single day inside the Work It DAILY platform as we coach people on their careers, helping them better understand themselves, and this is just one of the ways that we do it.

The second way you need to leverage the results you get from the Career Decoder Quiz is to use them in all your career tools (resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, etc.).

As a business-of-one, you have to market yourself to employers, and the way you market yourself is with things like your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, answers in your interview prep, and elevator pitch when networking. A lot of people tend to have the "everything and the kitchen sink" mentality where they put everything they've ever done in all of these career tools. They want to present themselves as a Jack or Jill of all trades. That is a fatal error. You need to brand yourself as a specialist, and, more importantly, as a specialist doing the kind of work you want to be doing. The Career Decoder results are what enable you to do that.

Now, a lot of people get their results and suddenly change their LinkedIn headline to "I'm a Builder, Mentor, Superconnector," or in their resume they write that they are an Educator or Warrior or Researcher. That's not what I want you to do. That's actually pretty hokey and that's not what this was intended for.

Instead, take a look at your top personas. You'll realize those personas are really verbs. So if you're a Builder, then you want to go through your tools and quantify your experience building things: "I've built X systems." Or if you're an Educator, "I've taught X number," or "I trained X number of people." Or if you're a Superconnector, "I've connected X number of customers/vendors."

You want to look at how you move the needle in your career. You want to quantify your accomplishments and work experience using the terms that align with your top workplace personas. Quantifying these things and branding yourself this way is how you're going to send the message that this is your specialty, this is how you like to create value, and you can prove it.

The third way you can leverage these results and improve your professional satisfaction is by understanding or getting familiar with your co-workers' personas.

It's important that you know how to leverage the strengths of other people. And let me explain why.

When you know what your strengths are, you're going to have more confidence, and when you know the strengths of others, you know how to tap into them and collaborate better. This is what companies are looking for—their top resources working well together and creating much better results.

By recognizing the talents of others and knowing to leverage them in concert with yours, you're going to gain a lot of trust, respect, and credibility within the organization.

I see a lot of people plateau in their careers because they get so focused on what they're good at and how they win that they lose sight of the fact that in order to get to the next level in their career, they need to partner with others. They need to be able to leverage the strengths of others. You can't be all eight personas. You're going to need all eight of those personas in the workplace. So if you want to get ahead in your career you need to put your ego aside. You need to leverage your own strengths, your own personas, and you need to leverage those of your teammates. Your credibility, the trust and the respect that you're going to get, is gonna skyrocket. And, of course, that's going to make you much happier on the job.

Those are the three ways you can leverage the Career Decoder results. Discovering your workplace personas is so empowering. And we don't just use the Career Decoder Quiz with job seekers and professionals. We also use it with employers. They use it with their staff to help them better understand their teammates. And if you're a leader, not only should you take this quiz, but you should also give it to all of your employees and learn their results so that you can tap into their strengths and make sure they're happy on the job.

I hope this free quiz helps you, your coworkers, and your leaders. If you want to work one-on-one with our coaches and learn more about your results, join us inside Work It DAILY today. Let us be your guide toward a happier, more satisfying career.

This article was originally published at an earlier date.