Determining your occupational interests may be easier than you think. Rather than pulling a rabbit out of a hat - and presenting your ideal career to you as a magical surprise - occupational interest tests present you with a set of career choices that you rank in order. After you rate several career sets, the program identifies recurrent career themes that reveal YOUR career choice.

In other words, these tests are not based on external norms, aptitude scores or comparisons with others. Instead, they analyze your own preferences and what careers you consider interesting. For this reason alone, occupational interest tests are my favorite career guidance tool.

The most important component of occupational interest tests is that they be based on a broad context of career themes. My current favorite comes from AnalyzeMyCareer. Their test, developed by Dr. Lankford (see their profile in my review of Personality tests), draws on a database containing over 1500 career descriptions. Click here (Online Assessments ) if you'd like to visit AnalyzeMyCareer.com now.

The test contains nine tables, each with twelve career tracks that you rank in your preferred order. The rank order from all nine tests is combined to provide your profile. Like all their tests, AnalyzeMyCareer, provides a free preview so you can run a trial test before you commit to the full test battery.

As your loyal guinea pig, I took their Occupational Interest test and received the following - very accurate and detailed - profile:

"Your preference in this inventory is the literary category. The careers listed in this category in the LVGI are: journalist, novelist, historian, librarian, magazine writer, book reviewer, script writer and poet. You could also include other careers such as those of: publisher, archeologist, film producer, editor, archivist, education administrator, lecturer, researcher and literary agent. The fact that your total comes to 25 or less is indicative of a very strong preference for these career areas. The literary career areas involve a great deal of reflection, research and intellectual ability. Literary interests span an enormously broad spectrum. Practitioners can delve into matters such as cinema, art, sculpture, music, anthropology, psychology, architecture, history of art, sociology and so on. In fact one can develop a literary interest in any area of human activity. Literary work can be understood in terms of writing plays, stories, works of reference, studies, biographies, autobiographies and so on.

"Literary interests frequently don't lead into career areas at all. For this reason, you can find people with very high levels of literary interests in occupations that would not be considered to be literary ones. The important issue for you is to keep in mind that it is rather difficult to pursue an occupation in purely literary areas unless we talk about some of the more commercially focused careers that have been mentioned above. In modern times there has been a huge growth in literary careers that are focused on the media. It is worth noting that many who work in this field work on a contract or a freelance basis. For this reason, you must be aware of the fact that it can take a good deal of time before you are noticed as a literary person worthy of note. Quite a number of literary people use a literary agent to promote their interests.

"The literary world is a special world in itself. However, even though it seems to be a world that is very focused on itself, the most successful practitioners are the people who cater for the emerging needs of society. Such emerging needs can be political, social, economic, cultural, religious, scientific, practical, musical or medical. As a matter of fact one look at the daily papers will give you an idea of the spread of interests and specializations within the literary field. This means in effect that the literary person needs to have quite a developed interest in all of the other career areas. Furthermore, you need to be able to focus especially on all of the careers associated with literary activity if you are to be successful. There are extremely close analogies between all the creative fields. It is hardly conceivable that a playwright would not be interested in all the literary career areas such as short story writing, poetry, drama and so on. The same is true of all of the other careers within the field."

AnalyzeMyCareer offers several career tests. In my mind their best tests are the Occupational Interest and Personality tests. They provide several others, including and Aptitude test and an Entrepreneurial Index. If you decide you'd like to do all their tests, consider using their "Expert Opinion" profile - which combines all the outcomes from all their tests. It's a pretty comprehensive package!

Click here to visit AnalyzeMyCareer.com's "suite" of career assessments: Online Assessments