Professional assessments
The New Year is a great time to evaluate your life, your goals, and your many professional achievements. One of the best ways to evaluate your life is to understand how you feel toward life, your work, yourself, your emotions, and your abilities. The University of Pennsylvania offers numerous free questionnaires that will help you measure your happiness and satisfaction with life. Below are six “authentic happiness” questionnaires that can help you improve your professional and personal lives that are used by the University in their research and are accessible by clicking “Register” at the top left of the page.
1. Authentic Happiness
Authentic Happiness Inventory – Have you ever taken the time to actually consider your happiness? This may sound silly, but it’s actually quite important. This quiz has you assess the levels of happiness in your life, including happiness at work, if you feel that you’ve achieved great things in your life, and if you feel isolated or bored with life. Taking a step back to examine your general overall happiness can help you when setting goals and when you’re deciding what steps to take in your professional and personal lives.
2. Strengths
Brief Strengths Test – Sometimes it’s hard to view ourselves objectively. This test will help you focus on your actual strengths, which can help you not only feel better about yourself, but can help you remember some strengths that you may have forgotten you possessed or ones that you never knew you had. Instead of focusing on your negatives, focus on your strengths! This test will measure a total of twenty-four character strengths.
3. Optimism
Optimism Test – The Optimism Test is more than just testing how optimistic you are about life in general. It’s specific to how optimistic you are about your future, and that includes your professional endeavors, goals, and achievements. This test will evaluate how you feel about yourself, others, and events—whether they are caused by permanent or momentary personality traits, flaws, or events.
4. Perseverance
Grit Survey – Do you persevere through both bad times and good times? This survey will help you understand your behavior and your core beliefs about yourself. The questions also focus on your passion for long-term goals and difficult challenges or situations. Do you have grit when it comes to overcoming obstacles and persevering until you achieve your goals? Maybe it’s time to find out.
5. Work-Life
Work-Life Questionnaire – This questionnaire is only four questions, but its aim is to evaluate how happy and satisfied you are with your work-life. Do you feel that your work is a calling or is it just a job to pay the bills? Knowing how you view your current employment or industry will help you understand if you need to change your line of work so that you can find satisfaction. You deserve to love what you do.
6. Life’s meaning
Meaning in Life Questionnaire – What you feel is the meaning of your life will greatly affect the industry in which you work, the job you accept, and your personal and professionals goals. And those who know their meaning in life are generally more confident in their abilities and in themselves in general. But if you don’t know the meaning in your life, don’t worry. You can find it.
Life is more than just going to work each day and counting the minutes until you can clock out and go home. You should love your life. You should be happy and satisfied. You should love your work, and if you don’t, maybe it’s time to consider a career change. Once you understand your important characters strengths, your happiness with your current job, and how you feel about life, you can make tweaks and changes that will make you a more dedicated professional and a much happier person.
