How Did This Career Test For College Seniors Get Born?
After mentoring seniors at Harvard, San Diego State, Berkeley and Iowa State, it seemed like students weren’t getting real life job clues.
So I wrote this test.
Then I ran ads in fourteen campus papers, offering a Starbucks card to anybody who would take the first written draft. About 200 college seniors, from all across the country, did. And from that, I discovered which questions created “duh” answers, and needed changing, which were misunderstood and which were relevant. And the test was rewritten. Then we put it up on this website, and got some browsers to take the WAYA profiler.
Strange stuff happened. A few answers changed. These students took twice as long online, despite it’s being easier to take this way than in the written test. And just over a dozen of the questions needed rewriting. (Read some of the other site pages to grasp the unique WAYA philosophy, which most career counselors and shrinks seem to applaud, so far.)
At first, I thought it was the difference between online and written tests. But thinking a little deeper, there was a more fundamental change than simply a difference between media. It was that the first batch were volunteers, who got a modest reward for taking the test. The second batch came from browsers on the web, who entered keywords while doing serious searches…and most significantly, they paid to take the test and get some answers.
So this lead to another WAYA rewrite.
And this will be a never-ending process of rewriting, as more and more take the test. Remember, what this test does is isolate those few traits you score as unique and distinctive. That’s unique. And those are what matter to your happiness and success. Match ‘em to a career and life’s great. Ignore ‘em and suffer forever.