My Plan Career Assessment: What You Get and What It Costs

MyPlan.com is a career and college planning website, and its career assessment is a set of four tests: a personality test, a career interest inventory, a skills profiler, and a values assessment. Each one produces its own report, and each report links to a ranked list of careers. Around the tests sit profiles of careers and college majors, with pay figures and short videos.

Most people who search for it did not find it by accident. A college career center or a first-year seminar told them to take it. Schools buy a license and give students a code, which is why the top results for this search are instruction sheets from places like the University of Cincinnati career center. The code also lets a career coach at your school see your results before you meet.

Is MyPlan Legit?

Yes. Colleges pay to license MyPlan.com for their students, and its tests follow well-known models: Holland's six interest types, a Myers-Briggs style personality type, and a card sort for values. The results are broad, but the site and the tests are real, not a lead-capture quiz.

MyPlan.com Is Separate From the NOVAworks MyPlan Program

Search results mix in a second thing with the same name. NOVAworks, a public job center in Silicon Valley, calls its job-search course for adults MyPlan. That program covers resumes, salary research, and informational meetings, and it uses its own worksheets on skills, interests, values, and personality. If your instructor or counselor said My Plan and you are a student, they almost always mean the MyPlan.com tests this page covers. If you are working with a NOVAworks counselor, ask them which one they want.

How a Career Assessment Helps in a Career Change

A career assessment turns your answers into a ranked run of jobs, based on where people who answered the way you did went on to work. It cannot tell you what to do. What it can do is give you words for things you half know and a list long enough to surprise you. For a student, the surprise is the point: most 19-year-olds can name about a dozen jobs, and a list of 739 turns up options they had never heard of.

For an adult changing careers, the use is different. You already know a lot of jobs. What you need is a reason to cross some off and a way to explain to yourself why the last one did not work. A MyPlan career assessment helps with the first part more than the second, and the sections below show where that line falls.

The four tests measure four different things, so they are worth taking in one sitting and reading side by side. Here is what each one asks and what it gives back.

MyPlan Personality Test: A Type, Not a Skill Read

The MyPlan personality test is built on the same Jung-based model as the Myers-Briggs. Plan on about 15 minutes. The questions come as pairs of statements. You mark one from each pair, and once you move to the next page you cannot go back and change an answer.

In practice, the pairs come a page at a time with a Next button and no Back button, so answer each one as you go instead of planning to fix it at the end. When a test finishes, its report opens right away, and the Career Match button sits on that report page, so you do not have to dig through the menus to find your list.

The result is one of 16 four-letter types, a page of statistics about that type, and a list of 739 careers ranked by how often people of your type work in them. It describes your preferences, such as whether you recharge alone or with people. It does not measure ability, and nothing in it shows whether you would do well in any of the careers on the list. Our page on the Myers-Briggs career test covers the type model in more depth.

MyPlan Career Interest Inventory and Values Assessment

The MyPlan career interest inventory has 75 questions about activities you would enjoy. It scores you on the six Holland interest types (realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional) and compares your pattern to people working in 739 careers. If you have met a Holland code test before, this is the same idea with a longer question set.

The values assessment is a card sort. You get a deck of about 20 cards, by reviewer counts, each describing something a job could give you, such as independence, recognition, or security, and you sort them by how much they matter in your ideal job. Because you have to rank them, you cannot call everything important. Your top cards are grouped into value clusters, and the same 739 careers are ranked against them. Nobody pays for this one, with or without a code. Our career values assessment page covers how to use a values result when two job offers look alike on paper.

The MyPlan Skills Profiler Runs on Your Own Ratings

The skills profiler walks you through a few dozen work skills, such as writing, active listening, and time management, and has you rate your own level in each one. The result is a profile of your stronger and weaker areas and careers that use your strong ones. Keep in mind that every rating is your own opinion of yourself. Nobody checks it.

MyPlan License Code: The Free Route Through Your School

If your school has a license, the steps on the University of Cincinnati sheet are typical. Go to the Account tab, choose Create Free Account, pick Student as your status, and type your school's code into the license code field. Tick the box to share results with your career advisor if you plan to meet one. The Assessments tab then shows all four tests, each with a Start Test button. Codes differ by school, so get yours from your career center page or your instructor. Elon University, for example, printed its code in a campus news story.

Is MyPlan Free? Only the Values Test, Unless Your School Has a Code

Test

Without a school code

With a school code

Time to plan for

Personality test

Paid

Free

About 15 minutes

Career interest inventory

Paid

Free

Roughly 15 to 20 minutes for 75 questions

Career skills profiler

Paid

Free

Roughly 15 minutes

Career values assessment

Free

Free

About 10 minutes

Complete test package (the three paid tests)

$19.95

Not needed

About an hour for all four

MyPlan says buying the three paid tests one at a time costs about 30 percent more than the package. The times are estimates, not figures MyPlan publishes. Prices are the ones MyPlan has listed, so check the site before you pay.

Do You Need to Pay for a Career Test, or Are Free Tests Enough?

If your school gives you a code, you pay nothing and should take all four. Without one, the free values assessment is worth ten minutes on its own, and a free interest quiz like My Next Move covers much of what the paid interest inventory does. The $19.95 package adds the personality type and the skills profile. That is a fair price for a student who wants all four lenses in one place. It is less useful if you mainly want an interest list, which you can get free elsewhere.

After each test you get a report, and every report has a Career Match button that opens a ranked list of careers with a description of each. All four reports stay in your account under Account, then My Portfolio, then My Reports, so you can come back to them or print them for a meeting with your career coach.

Here is what a set of MyPlan career match results can look like. Take a made-up student, Dana. Her personality report says ISTJ and puts accountant and auditor near the top. Her interest inventory comes out social and artistic, with teacher and counselor high. Her values sort puts independence and creativity first. Her skills profile is strongest in writing and weakest in math. Four reports, four different lists, and Dana still has to write a reflection paper on them for her first-year seminar.

What to Do When Different Tests Give You Different Career Suggestions

Expect the lists to disagree. Each test sorts the same 739 careers by a different yardstick, so a mismatch means the tests are doing their jobs, not that one is broken. Three steps help:

1. Look for overlap first. Take the top 50 from each Career Match list and mark any career that appears on two or more. Those are the best leads, because more than one part of you points at them.
2. Give interests and values more weight than type. The interest and values results come from what you chose. The type result puts you in one of 16 groups and ranks careers by what that group tends to do, which is the loosest link of the four.
3. Use skills as a to-do list. A low self-rating on a skill a career needs is a thing to learn or test, not a reason to drop the career.

For Dana, that could mean technical writer or editor, which turn up on her interest and skills lists and fit her wish for independence. Accountant drops, since only the type list backs it.

Writing a MyPlan Career Assessment Reflection Paper

If your class asks for a reflection paper, the method above gives you a structure. Say what each report found in a sentence or two. Name where they agreed and where they split. Pick two or three careers from the overlap and say what surprised you. Then say what you will do to test them. Instructors tend to reward that last part most, because it shows you used the results instead of summarizing them.

What to Do After You Get Your MyPlan Test Results

Turn the shortlist into facts. Look up each career on O*NET OnLine, the free Department of Labor career database, and read the tasks section, which lists what people in that job do all day. Cross off anything whose daily tasks sound dull to you. Then find someone working in each job that survives and ask what they did yesterday. Bring your printed reports to your career advisor, who can see them already if you ticked the share box, and ask which classes or internships would let you try the work before you commit.

The MyPlan career assessment does its best work for someone near the start who wants a wide list. It does less for someone who already has a field and needs help with how to work in it.

Students Assigned MyPlan by a Class or Career Center

This is the reader MyPlan was built for. The code makes it free, the four reports give you plenty to talk about with an advisor, and the career and major profiles are right there when you want to look something up. Still choosing a major? See how MyPlan compares in our roundup of the best career test for college students.

Adults Already Working in a Field

If you have ten years of work behind you, a ranked list of 739 careers rarely tells you anything new. You already know which jobs you could do. The questions you are asking are sharper: why does this role wear on you, and which of two or three next moves would suit your habits and pace? MyPlan's interest and values results can still help you name what you want more of. For the rest, you need a test built around your habits at work.

MyPlan is a sensible first step. The question is what to add once you have your four reports, and whether it is worth adding anything at all.

Are Career Tests Accurate and Worth Your Time?

They are accurate at what they measure, which is narrower than people hope. Interest inventories built on Holland's model have a long research record for showing which fields you would enjoy. Type-based tests are shakier, since they force a close call into one of two letters, and MyPlan's personality test uses the same model. Self-rated skills are only as good as your view of yourself. That is why reviewers call MyPlan's results generic: none of the four tests looks at how you decide, learn, or handle pressure, which is where two people with the same interests part ways. Our guide to the most accurate career test sets out what solid evidence looks like.

Should You Take More Than One Assessment, or Is One Enough?

For a student, MyPlan's four tests are already four assessments, and that is usually enough to start. If you want a second opinion on interests, the Strong Interest Inventory is the classic paid choice, usually taken through a counselor. The Myers-Briggs itself adds little if you already have your MyPlan type. The tests worth adding are ones that measure something MyPlan does not.

The Pigment Career Test Covers How You Work Each Day

Pigment calls itself career intelligence and was built for people with a work history already, most of them around 13 years in. Like MyPlan's personality test, it is forced-choice. The difference is what comes out. Instead of a type, you get a detailed picture of your decision style, the way you pick up new things, your communication habits, your relationship with deadlines, and what sustains you through a working week. It takes under 20 minutes. The research it draws on, about how well people fit their workplace and about using strengths at work, is published. Pigment is running a formal study of its own questions, and the results are not out.

Keep Your MyPlan List, Then Check It Against How You Work

Your Pigment report runs 36 pages on your strengths, how you think, your working style, and how you work with different people. Its career alignment section is where you hold your MyPlan shortlist up to all of that. $79.99, read the day you finish.

Test your MyPlan shortlist against how you work