January 20, 2022, by Leah Sharpe
Profiling for Success: Your Online Reflection Tool
By Charlene Binding, Employability Education Projects Officer
How easy is it for you to describe your learning style, figure out your personality type or pinpoint the things that matter to you most about your career? If you’re feeling a bit stuck about career areas that appeal to you, or aren’t sure how to articulate these important factors in a job application or at interview, then it’s time to discover Profiling for Success.
What is it?
Profiling for Success is an online tool to help aid personal reflection and build self-awareness that can support career exploration and decision making. When you first log in to Profiling for Success, you’re presented with four questionnaires, which each focus on a different area:
1. Learning Styles Indicator (LSI) – focuses on your preferred learning style by exploring questions, for example, around whether you prefer learning by doing or by absorbing information, whether you prefer dealing with facts and details or taking a more intuitive and analytical approach.
2. Type Dynamics Indicator (TDI®) – focuses on your personality preferences. TDI helps you to gauge how your preferences impact on you, how you react and behave in certain situations and what impact this might have on you and others you interact with.
3. Values-based Indicator of Motivation (VbIM) – focuses on your deeply held values. This tool can be particularly insightful when generating career ideas and exploring what matters to you most about a career.
4. Career Interests Inventory – Dodec (CII-Dodec) – focuses on career themes and classifies hundreds of jobs organised under six career themes, 12 sub-themes and 24 different job families. This can be a particularly helpful tool to take if you are yet to decide about your future career direction.
You can take all four questionnaires or take one or two and come back later to do the others. Additional questionnaires and assessments can also be accessed as part of the portal, such as psychometric tests and a planning tool to help with setting deadlines and goals.
Build in focused time
As with many of these kinds of tools and assessments, they can take time and mental energy to complete effectively. We recommend you block out an hour or so to focus on the task, when you’re not going to be distracted by a fellow student, member of your family or something on Netflix.
Feedback reports
Most of the assessments on offer produce feedback reports to help you interpret them. Some of the reports are quite detailed and can take time to digest so talking this through with a careers adviser can help you unpick what the outputs might mean for you and your next steps.
I’m interested – how do I access it?
As a current student you need to use your university log in to access the portal. Business school postgraduates will need to email businesspcs@nottingham.ac.uk. If you’re a graduate, simply email careers-team@nottingham.ac.uk to get set up.
Profiling for Success is just one of the many career resources, tools and advice available to you as a student at Nottingham. No matter what stage you’re at or how much time you have to spare, check out the Careers website to discover the resource that’s right for you.
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