Benjamin Todd

It's also only weakly correlated with job satisfaction.

Studies find correlations of around 0.1 to 0.3.

So that's why we don't pay much attention to traditional career tests.

What does work in predicting where you'll excel, according to the research?

In the table above, interviews rank near the top, which suggests the following method.

Talk to people who have experience recruiting in the field and ask them how you'd stack up compared to other candidates.

This makes a lot of sense.

Experts are probably pretty good at making this sort of judgment call.

The cluster of job tryout procedures, job knowledge tests, and work samples also do well.

And that suggests another intuitive method.

Try to get as close to actually doing the work as possible, and then see how that goes.

We talk about some ways to do that below.

Surprisingly, IQ tests correlate the most.

But they're not so useful for helping you figure out which kind of job is the best fit for you relative to other jobs.

And that's setting aside the question of what IQ tests actually measure.

All this said, it's important to keep in mind that none of these methods work that well.

It's just hard to say where you might be able to excel or not in the future.

And this means you should keep an open mind and give yourself the benefit of the doubt.

You probably have more options than it first seems.

And ultimately, the only way to find out is to take the plunge and actually try things.