Help Your Child Discover their Natural Talents and Career Match
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What is Aptitude Testing?
Our aptitude testing service is a mix of hands-on and digital assessments that provide objective data about your natural strengths and talents. We’re both a testing service and a research institute with over 100 years of research into careers and human aptitudes.
Aptitude testing helps high school and college students make strengths-based career and educational choices using data that predicts the directions they have the most potential for. Their test results can help them pick a career direction; narrow down college majors; choose between a university path or trade school; and might even provide them with new career possibilities they hadn’t considered before. Our research shows that the secret to a satisfying career is finding work that aligns with natural talent and potential.
Understanding your child’s aptitudes is a shortcut to getting them on the right path for their future, while saving you time and tuition money.
The JOCRF Difference
What are Aptitudes?
Aptitudes are natural talents for doing certain kinds of things quickly and easily.
These abilities aren’t related to what you’ve learned in school or your interests, which can change over time.
Aptitudes are talents you’re born with, so you can use your test results to make decisions throughout your life.
Our Tests are Different
Most career tests stop at measuring personality or interests, which can provide an incomplete and changing view of the individual.
Our tests go a step further by combining research-backed personality assessments with performance-driven data about your natural talents.
Your test results provide a snapshot of your whole self and the careers that you're most likely to excel in and enjoy.
How will Aptitude Testing Help Me?
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is one of the most important aspects of career planning.
Aptitude testing provides objective data about the areas you’re likely to succeed in and the ones you might want to avoid.
People tend to be more satisfied and successful in occupations that use their aptitudes.
Aptitude Testing and Research since 1922
Since 1922, we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of people understand their innate potential and choose careers that fit how their minds like to work, naturally.
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Comprehensive Testing for Only $950
Our Testing Service Includes:
- Six total hours of testing (Two three-hour sessions that can be taken on a single day, or spread over two days.)
- One 60-90 minute results consultation
- A second optional consultation that can be taken within a year of testing
- Written materials (digital report and book) are also included
- Multiple convenient testing locations across the United States
As a nonprofit organization, we are firmly committed to keeping prices as low as possible while covering our operating costs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Aptitudes are natural abilities or talents that you’re born with. Our research shows that aptitudes stabilize around the age of 14 and remain relatively stable throughout the lifespan.
There are no good or bad aptitudes or passing or failing scores on our aptitude tests.
Many available career tests stop at measuring personality or interests, which can provide an incomplete picture of the individual. Interest tests, in particular, can also give different results at different life stages.
Our service is different. We combine aptitude testing with research-backed personality assessments to provide a holistic view of an individual’s personality, interests, and natural talents and the kind of career pathways that would match their whole self.
Our comprehensive aptitude tests are performance-based and provide objective, neutral data about innate strengths.
These scores aren’t influenced by interests, grades in school, or any other outside factors. They’re a snapshot of how your mind likes to naturally work.
Our research shows that choosing a career or college major that matches your aptitudes leads to greater satisfaction and success.
Because aptitudes are stable over time, the results from our tests don’t expire and can always be used to make informed career decisions.
We have been researching human abilities, and constructing and validating tests for these abilities since 1922. Because they require the use of specialized apparatus, audiovisual equipment and individual administration, our battery of ~21 different aptitude tests is only available at the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation.
We measure natural abilities like spatial visualization, reasonings (numerical, logical ordering, diagnostic), ideation, goal-setting, design, music, dexterity and more. We also offer a proprietary workplace personality test and research-backed personality assessments based on the Big Five personality traits.
We also an industry-standard career interest survey called The Self-Directed Search.
Our tests are a mix of hands-on and digital assessments. Each set of tests is anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half long, with breaks in between sets. Most of our tests are timed and require the use of both hands.
The testing must be completed in one of our 15 testing locations.
Our tests feel more like puzzles or games than school tests. Some are as short as a couple of minutes and others are as long as twenty minutes. There’s a lot of variety throughout the day.
There are two testing sessions, each about three hours long, and a third appointment to review the results. This results appointment is 60-90 minutes and held over Zoom or in person on a separate day from testing.
Many of our clients opt for a one-day testing format (testing in the morning and afternoon with a lunch break in the middle of the day), but half-day testing appointments can also be arranged.
The youngest age we test is 14, but there is no upper age limit.
About half of our clients are high school or college students and the other half are working adults.
The fee is $950.
That flat fee (less than the cost of a university course) includes six hours of testing, one 60-90 minute results consultation and a second, optional consultation that can be taken within a year of testing.
Written materials (a 20-page digital report with career suggestions; industry standard career interest survey; and 111-page reference book) are also included.
As a nonprofit organization, we are firmly committed to keeping prices as low as possible while covering our operating costs.
One flat fee includes:
- Six total hours of testing (Two three-hour sessions that can be taken on a single day, or spread over two days.).
- One 60-90 minute results consultation.
- A second, 60-90 minute consultation that can be taken within a year of testing.
- Written materials (newly updated interactive, digital report with career suggestions and reference book).
- Industry-standard career interest survey, “The Self-Directed Search.”
- Career guidance that can be used today and throughout your career. Our research shows that aptitudes are relatively stable over time, so the information you’ll receive never expires.
Contact any of our 15 testing locations by email or phone to schedule testing.
All of our locations offer the same battery of aptitude tests for the same fee.
All of our testing locations are listed here.
Appointments must be made in advance, especially for holidays and school vacation times. The advance notice needed varies from month to month.
During the summer, it’s best to schedule further in advance. Our busiest times are July and August, Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Year’s weeks, any school vacation time, and the holidays the Foundation is open.
Outside of our high-demand times, you may be able to schedule with just a few days’ or a week’s notice.
Our offices are generally open Monday through Friday. Some offices are occasionally open on Saturdays. Contact the office where you plan to be tested.
All offices are open on the following holidays: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Indigenous Peoples/Columbus Day, and Veterans Day. All are closed on New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.