CareerLeader: Guided Tour:

CareerLeader™ Guided Tour

CareerLeader™ also makes a great gift! Read about our gift program.

Question 1:
Is CareerLeader™ only for MBAs, or people who've definitely decided on careers in business?

Question 2: How does the full program of CareerLeader™ differ from your book Discovering Your Career in Business?

Question 3: How does CareerLeader™ differ from other popular inventories like the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs test?

Question 4: I'm not an American; is CareerLeader™ useful across different cultures?

Question 5: Are people usually satisfied?

Question 6: What does this cost?

Question 7: Am I too old/too young to benefit from CareerLeader™?

Question 1: Is CareerLeader™ only for MBAs, or people who've definitely decided on careers in business?

The answer is "No" on all counts. We've been doing career counseling for a collective 30 years plus, and work with people at all levels, at all stages of their careers, at all ages, and in a very wide variety of industries and functions. I'm sure there are some combinations we haven't seen, but not many. There is no "minimum" in terms of education, experience or salary level for our clients.

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Question 2: How does the online program of CareerLeader™ differ from your book Discovering Your Career in Business?

CareerLeader™ is a comprehensive self-assessment program combined with detailed information on real-world ways to express your interests and motivations in business work. This program comprises six major steps:

Assessing what your interests in business work are (and aren't), including an analysis of your entrepreneurial attributes.
Discovering which values in the working world motivate you the most (ie, money, recognition, helping others, etc.).
Analyzing your business-relevant abilities, focusing in on what your strengths and weaknesses are and how you compare to your peers.
Integrating the data from the three areas above and bringing it all together into a comprehensive picture.
Stepping into the corporate world and examining aspects of corporate "cultures" and how they are likely to affect you. This knowledge will help you find the corporate environment in which you are most likely to excel.
Offering detailed analyses on 23 major business career paths, examining what work interests and values they typically offer (and don't offer), and what skills are most critical for success in each field.

Discovering Your Career in Business includes an earlier version of the Business Career Interest Inventory™, along with interpretive material for that. CareerLeader™ offers additional interpretive material and an updated "engine," reflecting our continuing research. It is also directly tied into our CareerLeader™ Profiles, which recommend specific business careers based on your interest pattern suggests would be worth investigating (which you can then do immediately by reviewing the Profiles included in CareerLeader™). The book offers a wealth of real-life examples of individuals making decisions based on this information; this anecdotal information is not included in the online CareerLeader™ program. It also offers several "active imagination" excercises which may prove useful to you as you think about a career transition.

Overall, we feel that Discovering Your Career in Business and CareerLeader™ complement each other. If you purchase CareerLeader™, we recommend the book as well and offer it at a discount. The retail cost of the book is $22, and it is available in most major bookstores. If you wish to purchase a copy of Discovering Your Career in Business along with CareerLeader™, we will ship a copy to residents of the United States at our cost, $12; this is a direct order from our publisher and takes about two weeks to deliver. Alternately, you could order via Amazon.com for $17.60 plus shipping; we'll provide links to the ordering page on their site. Due to the costly international book shipment rates, we must refer all international shipment orders to Amazon.com.

We're very proud of our book and on its own it is a very useful career interests tool, but it is not as comprehensive a program as CareerLeader™. For more information about our book, please see our Discovering Your Career in Business info area.

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Question 3: How does CareerLeader™ differ from other popular inventories like the Strong Interest Inventory™ and the Myers-Briggs^(R) test?

There are three key differences between CareerLeader™ and other interest or personality inventories like the Strong™ or the Myers-Briggs^(R) tests. First, CareerLeader™ is specifically designed, from the ground up, to help you analyze yourself with respect to a career in business (including helping to show you whether or not you really want a business-related career). Other inventories are effective at helping people choose between broader choices: between a career in dentistry vs. being an engineer, for example. What CareerLeader™ is about, is helping you to understand the business-related elements of work that will inspire and motivate you, and thus to help you determine which business careers you will be most successful and satisfied in.

This brings us to our second key difference. Since CareerLeader™ is specifically about business careers, we're able to become much more detailed than other inventories. CareerLeader™ goes far beyond telling you that you should be (for example) in business, or in finance; you may be steered into commercial banking, or institutional securities sales, or venture capital. No other inventory is able to make such fine-tuned distinctions.

Lastly, CareerLeader™ is able to take all of this self-analysis several steps farther and cross-reference your unique profiles of interests, values and abilities with real-world opportunities and considerations. We offer insights on how you can determine which corporate cultures will offer the best fit for your own style (as determined by our inventories). And armed with your newly gained self-knowledge, you will use the CareerLeader™ Profiles to "try on" different business career paths to see how well they might suit you. Thanks to our over 30 years of consulting with business professionals, we're able to provide very realistic pictures of what to expect in the 23 different career paths we examine.

In sum, CareerLeader™ differs from other tests because it:

Is all about business
Assesses all three elements of who you are that are most important in making a career choice: your interests, values, and abilities
And provides in-depth looks into a broad range of what the business world has to offer, allowing you to determine how well you would fit in each of the 23 careers profiled.

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Question 4: I'm not an American; is CareerLeader™ useful across different cultures?

Some individuals have wondered about inherent cultural biases that may be present in CareerLeader™. The assessment tools used in CareerLeader™ have been developed using samples of business professionals from the United States and Canada and have been used extensively with business professionals from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. They have been used, but less extensively, with business professionals from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

If you were raised and educated in one of these latter regions, we strongly urge you to purchase a copy of Discovering Your Career in Business along with CareerLeader™. In Discovering Your Career in Business, use the exercises in Chapter 3 as your primary assessment tool. You can then also use the assessment instruments and the interpretive materials in CareerLeader™ to extend your assessment analysis.

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Question 5: Are people usually satisfied?

Well, most of our clients were referred by former clients, so that's a good sign. Really, the only people who seem to go away unhappy are those who want "magic" of some sort so we encourage those folks to look elsewhere.

We also have collected some CareerLeader™ testimonials from our first group of CareerLeader™ users that we invite you to read over.

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Question 6: What does this cost?

CareerLeader™, our online career self-assessment tool, costs $95, with $20 discounts available to HBS alumni, for a final price of $75.

If you decide to purchase CareerLeader™, we recommend a copy of our published book Discovering Your Career in Business. Retail cost of the book is $22 and major bookstores usually have it. We offer to ship a copy directly from our publisher to residents of the United States for an additional $12; delivery time is estimated at two weeks. Alternately, you may use Amazon.com, which costs $17.60 plus shipping, but they offer faster delivery options. All international orders of the book must be handled via Amazon.com (our publisher's international shipping charges make Amazon.com both less expensive and faster on international shipments).

Online sign-up is available right now; vist our order information page, or the complete tour of CareerLeader™.

Either separately or in conjunction with CareerLeader™, you might be considering a personal consultation (see our counseling information area for more). We charge $200 an hour, with a minimum of one hour. Most people get what they need in one to two hours. We also offer a total, super-comprehensive, in-depth career-self assessment for a flat fee of $2500, and includes complementary access to CareerLeader™ (and the CareerLeader™ Profiles), and a complementary copy of our book, Discovering Your Career in Business.

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Question 7: Am I too old/too young to benefit from CareerLeader™?

Since we've been available on the internet (April, 1998), our retail customers' ages have ranged from 20 to 59, and we've worked with private clients older than that.

There really is no "maximum age" that you might benefit from using CareerLeader™ -- the correct question you should ask yourself is whether you need to rethink your career direction and goals in a broad way that involves taking some stock of who you are and what you want. If the answer to that question is yes, then CareerLeader™ can help you to do that.

As for a "minimum age," psychological research has shown that one's core interests in life are usually well developed by age 20 or so, and that these interests will tend to remain stable for the rest of our lives. Therefore, we don't recommend CareerLeader™ for anyone younger than a junior in college (ie, about 20 years old).

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