Why abilities? Why should they be tested?
Because effectively using your innate talents is your key to greatness and success.
Everyone is born with natural aptitudes. Natural aptitudes are not influenced by education or experience; they are just there to be harnessed. By the age of fourteen your natural aptitudes have matured enough to be defined and measured.
Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things easily and quickly. They have little to do with knowledge or culture, or education, or even interests. They have to do with heredity. Musical talent and artistic talent are examples of such aptitudes.
It has been our experience that people tend to be more satisfied and successful in occupations that challenge their aptitudes and do not demand aptitudes that they lack.
One example of an innate ability is manifested when an individual is confronted with a number of seemingly unrelated objects or facts and is asked to organize them into their unifying relationship. We call this ability Classification. Individuals who score high in this ability are good at solving new problems and like change and challenge. Persons who score low will find that they work best when their tasks are well-defined and organized.
We measure your talents, the areas where you would do your best and be most happy. This testing program is completely different from the ineffective career tests you may have taken previously. Most career tests are based on your interests. Just because you are interested in something doesn't mean you have any talent for it. You could love basketball but stand only four feet tall.
PEOPLE ENJOY DOING WORK THEY DO WELL NATURALLY
Whether they are called abilities, talents, innate qualities or aptitudes, they are instilled in each of us at birth. They are those essential elements which combine in each of us to define what we do easily and well. Some talents are so firmly implanted in some individuals as to control virtually every moment of their lives. Mozart was impelled to compose his extraordinary music from the age of five. Dickens had finished The Pickwick Papers by the time he was 24. Einstein wrote his first essay on the theory of relativity at the age of sixteen.
But few of us are embryonic Mozarts or Einsteins. All of us are a combination of talents, some more compelling than others, no one of them so predominant as to drive everything we do. What separates and distinguishes us from other individuals is the way in which our unique abilities are patterned or configured in each of us. Research shows that abilities come together for everyone in a definable pattern. We are able to determine this pattern once the individual reaches the age of fourteen.
Abilities are distinct from skills. Skills are function-driven capacities acquired over time, practice and experience. Abilities are innate. Manual-dexterity, for example, is an ability; violin-concertizing is a resulting skill. We are happiest and most satisfied when we make maximum use of our abilities. An individual may develop the skills to practice law, for example, but if she doesn't have the inborn talents which make the practice of law easy and satisfying, she will find her work unrewarding (and, even, as in the case of many lawyers, frustrating). When we apply our abilities to our study or work, we do our tasks better.
The trick is to recognize and understand the abilities which reside in you and the way in which those abilities relate to each other. Confronted by new sets of problems or changes in circumstance, how quickly do you generate new ideas for solving them? How easily and quickly do you discern relationships between seemingly unrelated objects? How easily can you rearrange data in logical order? How easily can you restructure objects supplied in two dimensions into their three dimensions? These are some of the questions that will be answered when you understand and utilize your innate abilities.
The purpose of a valid test of innate abilities is to determine in a reliable way the ease with which an individual can perform the tasks which measure those abilities. The Highlands Battery consists of nineteen different tasks or worksamples. Together, they tell us what pattern of abilities lies in each of us and how our abilities can be used most easily and effectively.
CAN'T I SELF-ASSESS MY NATURAL ABILITIES WITHOUT GOING THROUGH A TESTING PROGRAM?
|
