Thank you very much for participating in the Swiss Career Survey! On this page you will learn more about the goals of the survey, how to use your results and how to interpret your evaluation form. Let‘s start with the central and most important idea right here in the introduction: the Swiss Career Survey is a starting point and not an end point for your considerations regarding your professional career. Enjoy learning more about the Survey and how you can use it!
Interpretation support
Structure of the evaluation form
Interpreting the evaluation report correctly
Typical profile shapes
Your three most important benefits
The greatest benefit of the Swiss Career Survey is hidden in its obviousness: participating guides you to systematically think about your preferences regarding your professional career. The Swiss Career Survey questionnaire confronted you with a large number of choices: Are you more interested in topic A or topic B? Do you feel more comfortable doing one or the other task? Is one or the other characteristic of a corporate culture more important to you? Our primary mission is to encourage you to explore and question your own preferences. Our starting point is that the planning of a professional career must first suit you personally.
Another benefit of the Swiss Career Survey is that you will receive your own evaluation report immediately after participation. On your evaluation form you will find several presentations of your aggregated data - each contrasted with a comparison group. These illustrations and comparisons give you the opportunity to systematically review and involve yourself with a summary of the information you provided us with. Keep in mind to retain a critical distance to the presented figures and illustrations: the Survey should not give you the sense of providing you with definitive answers, but food for thought for your personal elaboration. You may find some results more intuitive than others. When the latter is the case: dig deeper and reflect. Once you have studied the evaluation form, you will be better able to answer central questions about your unique professional characteristics, to align your application documents accordingly, and to base your job selection thereupon.
Your third major benefit from the study is that you can actively use the findings from the evaluation report to help you make your next career move. This benefit can be achieved in three steps. Firstly, you can use the mean value lines and the comparison values on the evaluation form to see how your aggregated information differs from the information provided by your potential competitors in terms of positions of interest to you. Secondly, your interest, competence, and value profiles enable you to systematically assess which employers and which job advertisements suit you best. Third, if you want to apply for a specific position, you can use your interest, competence, and value profiles to directly address your fit with the job in your cover letter, in telephone calls, and personal interviews. Your personal evaluation form is a valuable aid to systematically present your own profile and to find out which differences to other applicants in the same industry or in the same functional areas should be discussed.
What the Swiss Career Survey is not
The Swiss Career Survey does not provide conclusive and unquestionable results in the search for answers on your path to your professional career. Instead, the Survey is intended to guide you to systematic reflection and offer food for thought on how to shape your own professional positioning.
The Swiss Career Survey does not give you an answer as to which interest, competence and value profile is "right" or "wrong". No profile is "right" or "wrong". No matter what your profile looks like: the next thought should always be "How do I use this profile for my professional career?" and not "How do I change my profile so that I fit? Our point of view is always that your professional career should fit you and not you to your professional career.
The Swiss Career Survey never has the last word. Your preferences will change. If you take part in the survey again in a year's time, new insights, experiences, and attitudes will probably change your profile as well. Preferences in professional realization can be quite changeable. We recommend you to consider the gathered insight as snapshot as of today. You have the last word.
The Swiss Career Survey is not a purely psychometric project but an applied project that operationalizes scientific findings. It aims to put the sometimes conflicting demands of several objectives of academic career counselling into a meaningful combination. The Survey is, thus, a central pillar of a practice-oriented didactic, procedural counselling, and measurement concept. Its further development is based on the application knowledge of and feedback with the Career Services of your university and thus on the participant feedback.