Q. I’m about to graduate High School and I don’t know what I want to be “when I grow up”. Do you think that a career quiz might help me decide?

A. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But maybe not for the reasons that you think. You see, as the great Quizmaster, I’ve found one thing to be true: A career quiz, or any quiz for that matter, is always biased towards the thoughts and belief’s of the person who wrote it.

Usually a career quiz is written for entertainment purposes only. Now, if you are calling it a career quiz, but you really mean some sort of standardized occupational guidance test like professional career counsellors and the military use, then those are typically valid assessments of your career capabilities.

However, since you are asking the question here, and I am definitely not a career counsellor, then I’m going to assume that you are talking about your run-of-the-mill career quiz like the type that you find in typical magazines and on a variety of general audience web sites.

So, the reason that I said “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes” is because anything that gets someone thinking about career options is a good thing. A well-written career quiz has the effect of causing you to brainstorm over your career options. What you want to be “when you grow up” may be a moving target for you. Most people evolve as they mature and their goals change. What sounds like a good idea now may be far away from what you will eventually become. However, as I said, a career quiz gets you thinking and that’s a start!

When looking for a career quiz take a good look at the type of questions that are being asked. Remember what I said about the author’s bias earlier? You want to find a career quiz that asks “horizontal” questions rather than “vertical” ones. For example, a horizontal question might be: “Do you enjoy working against deadlines?”, while I vertical question might be “do you prefer the precision of hand tools versus the speed of power tools?”.

Horizontal career quiz questions are designed to explore general career likes and dislikes while “vertical” questions tends to try and shoehorn you into a particular career path. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a place for a vertical career quiz. For example, if you are thinking about a career in woodworking, and you are trying to decide if you want to be a cabinet maker or a house framer, a vertical career quiz is exactly what you need.

The important thing to remember is to never make a career decision based solely upon the results of some career quiz that you happen to come across. If the quiz gets you to thinking that you might enjoy some particular career, then research that option more fully. A career quiz is simply another tool to help you navigate the pathways of life. Good luck!

Q. Can you tell me the benefits of publishing an online quiz versus a printed one?

A. Well, the first benefit of publishing an online quiz that comes to mind is the fact that it’s an outstanding way to drive traffic to your web site. People love quizzes and they take ones that are printed in magazines all of the time. It’s reasonable to assume that if these same people knew about the existance of an online quiz that they would beat a path to your home page.

Another great feature of offering an online quiz is that you can change the subject regularly. In fact, you could offer a subscription where members sign up to be notified whenever a new online quiz gets posted.

An online quiz can also be used as a sales tool. One of the best ways of accomplishing this is to link your quiz questions to affiliate sites where you earn money when people make purchases. Then you can have a “scavenger hunt” online quiz where people have to visit those sites to find the quiz answers.

People also like to take an online quiz because they can get instant scoring without having to turn the page upside down, or flip to the end of the magazine, to find out how they did. You can even design your online quiz so that it gives instant feedback after every answer is entered.

One last thing to consider is that you can create keyword-rich versions of your online quiz and then post the URLs to search engines. That way you will not only get search traffic from people who like quizzes, but you’ll get traffic from people who are searching on the terms that you include in your online quiz!

So, while it’s not likely that a printed quiz is going to become obsolete any time soon. The Internet has once again forever impacted the way that we communicate. Today’s latest example? The online quiz.