Using the CliftonStrengths Assessment for Career Development
What Is The CliftonStrengths Assessment?
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is an online talent assessment that helps you discover what you naturally do best. It comes with highly personalized results and can show you how to develop your great talents into strengths to best maximize your potential. The assessment has been taken by over 34 million people worldwide and is used by over 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
Research has shown that those who have the opportunity to use their CliftonStrengths are
- 6x as likely to be engaged in their job
- 6x as likely to strongly agree that they have the chance to do what they do best every day
- 3x as likely to report having an excellent quality of life
With that in mind, people are also more confident and more likely to achieve their goals!
Strengths-Based Development
Society often focuses more on what is wrong with you than what is right with you. We often think about our weaknesses first. Strengths-based development is different — first it focuses on what people do well. After, it works on emphasizing and developing those strengths to help individuals become even more productive.
When you work on improving your weaknesses, you can only get so far… but when you invest in your strengths, the potential is endless! We can find power in our differences, it’s what makes us unique.
How It Can Be Helpful For Your Career
- Explore potential career pathways
- Assist in self-advocacy such as during promotions or negotiations
- Building your personal brand
- Developing answers to common interview questions such as “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”
- Raising awareness of your unique leadership style & capabilities
How The Assessment Works
The assessment takes about 30–40 minutes to complete. There is a set of 177 paired statements and choose which ones best describe you. The assessment measures your unique talents — your natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving and categorizes them into the 34 CliftonStrengths themes.
The 34 themes are divided into 4 domains:
- Relationship Building
- Influencing
- Executing
- Strategic Thinking
The I School provides access codes for a Top 5 Report. This report reveals the first five talent themes in your CliftonStrengths profile and includes basic strategies to help you start applying your most powerful CliftonStrengths to succeed.
Benefits of CliftonStrengths Top 5
- A basic understanding of your natural talents and how you can succeed using personalized insights about your first five CliftonStrengths themes
- Greater confidence and empowerment thanks to a deeper understanding of how you can use your CliftonStrengths to succeed
- An easy way to describe your unique talent DNA to teammates and others using the common language of CliftonStrengths
- Improved performance at work and anywhere when you use the proven advice for how to apply your strengths in every part of your life
- Success in spite of your weaknesses, with concepts and strategies that help you manage — not fix — what you don’t do best, so you can focus on getting the most from your strongest CliftonStrengths themes
The chance of you getting the same Top 5 Result as someone else is 1 in 34 million. You are uniquely powerful! The results are highly customized and differ based on the combination of your top CliftonStrengths. For example, if you and a friend both have Relator as your #1 strength, the descriptions of how it shows up for each of you will be different based on your surrounding CliftonStrengths!
What to Keep In Mind When You See Your Results
Since the I School provides the Top 5 Report only, you may not see all domains represented (for example, you might only have two or three of the domains in your Top 5) — this is OK and totally normal! Themes are neutral and they are not labels. Note that names of themes don’t necessarily describe what they mean (for example, “Restorative” does not relate to keeping peace & “Woo” doesn’t mean you love to party!) — be sure to read through your report & be sure to chat with a CliftonStrengths coach about it.
1:1 Coaching to Interpret Your Results
The CliftonStrengths assessment is one resource and lens to help you see your natural tendencies & strengths. You might be surprised reading content you never realized about yourself, or perhaps nodding your head with everything the report is saying. Regardless, it is a lot of information to take in and we suggest processing your results with Amanda Cheung, Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach. Participating in 1:1 coaching will help with the following:
- Unlock your potential & help you tackle challenges
- Help you focus on doing more of what you naturally do best
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses, and how to manage them
- Increase your professional development
- Support you in a career transition
- Help develop you as a leader
- And more!
Note
The I School has a limited number of free codes. If the assessment has not been completed within 4 weeks, your code will be retracted.
All I School students and alumni who take the assessment are required to participate in a follow-up coaching session to interpret your report. You will be asked to schedule a follow-up appointment about 2 weeks to 4 weeks in the future. Please plan to complete the assessment before the follow-up appointment, and allow enough time to read and think about the results before the appointment.