Overview
Help Your Teen Find a Career Direction That Fits
A structured career assessment that helps your teen understand their strengths and explore career directions that fit.
For parents who want to help their student choose a better-fit major, college path, and career.
The Oxford Career Testing Program combines natural ability testing, personal style, and interests to help high school and college students identify careers and college majors that fit. Using research-based assessments and our unique Triangulation Method, the program provides an objective picture of each student’s natural talents, career potential, and educational options.
Are you wondering how to help your student decide?
- Which career directions fit my student’s strengths?
- What college majors and educational paths should we consider?
- How does my student learn best?
- What college or study environment may suit them?
- How can my student approach problems and decisions?
- How can we support better study and homework habits?
What the program can help reveal…
- Reveals your student’s natural abilities and strengths
- Identifies career directions that may fit your student well
- Builds confidence through greater self-understanding
- Helps your student evaluate college majors and educational options
- Provides a clearer sense of direction for academic and career planning
- Highlights potential career mismatches and occupational pitfalls
- The results help families make more informed decisions about career direction, college majors, school environments, study approaches, and potential occupational pitfalls.
Who is it for?
- High school students who are unsure what career direction fits them
- Students choosing a college major or educational path
- Parents who want objective guidance beyond grades and opinions
- College students reconsidering their major or career direction
We measure your student’s natural abilities, interests, and personal style, highlighting areas where they may perform well and find greater satisfaction. Unlike many career quizzes based mainly on interests or self-reported personality, our program combines multiple research-based assessments. Interest alone does not show whether a path matches a student’s abilities.
There is no pass or fail. A lower score on one ability may provide useful information, because career satisfaction often depends on the overall pattern of strengths and limitations and how that pattern fits the demands of a role.
The student completes the testing and materials from the comfort of their own home. No travel needed!
View the Sample Reports
These reports comprise the complete package of reports for our testing program.
How the Oxford Career Testing Program Works
STEP 1: TESTING
PART 1: Personal Style Assessment. Your student begins with an intake questionnaire designed to identify their interests, preferences, and goals related to careers and education.
PART 2: The Highlands Ability Battery. Your student completes a series of timed work samples that measure natural abilities. Unlike an interest or personality questionnaire, these exercises show how your student naturally performs different types of tasks..
The results help identify patterns in your student’s abilities that can inform decisions about careers, college majors, learning environments, and potential areas of specialization. After completing the Battery, your student receives a detailed report explaining the results.
PART 3: Interests and Personality Analysis. Your student also completes assessments of interests and personal style. These results help identify fields and work environments that may be satisfying and motivating for them.
Rather than relying on a single career test, the Oxford Program combines your student’s natural abilities, interests, and personal style to develop a more complete picture of potential career and educational directions.
STEP 2: CAREER MATCHING
After testing is complete, we analyze your student’s results using the Oxford Program’s Triangulation Method. Their natural abilities, interests, and personal style are compared to identify patterns and develop career and college-major recommendations that fit their individual strengths.
STEP 3: RESULTS AND COUNSELING
Your student receives the Oxford Program report along with a recorded interpretation explaining the results. 2 hours of follow-up counseling gives your family an opportunity to discuss the findings, career options, college majors, and questions about next steps.
The Highlands Ability Battery
Help Your Student Understand Their Natural Abilities and Career Strengths
The Highlands Ability Battery is a performance-based career assessment designed to identify your student’s natural abilities. It measures how they naturally perform different types of tasks, giving families information beyond interests or self-described personality.
Your student completes 19 timed work samples that measure a range of natural abilities. Each sample looks at how easily and efficiently they perform a particular type of task.
The results are presented in an individual ability profile. We look at patterns and combinations of abilities to better understand the types of work, problem-solving, learning, and environments that may fit your student’s strengths.
This information adds an important dimension to career planning because abilities are different from interests and personality. A student may be interested in a career while having natural strengths that point toward particular roles or specialties within that field.
The results are intended to provide useful direction, not to dictate one specific career choice. They can help your family compare possible career paths, college majors, and areas of specialization.
32 students at Colorado State University were asked to compare a number of assessments which they had completed as part of their course.
The group was asked to rate 4 different well-known assessments in terms of effectiveness in measuring their abilities and talents, as well as in guiding them in future career decisions. The assessments were the Highlands Ability Battery, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest and Skills Confidence Inventory, and True Colors.
Percentage of Students that ranked it #1 in measuring abilities and talents
Percentage of Students that ranked it #1 in effectiveness in guiding them in career decisions
How the Results Can Help Your Student
The Highlands Ability Battery provides structured information about your student’s natural abilities through performance-based work samples. The results can help your family understand patterns that may be relevant to career and educational decisions. The 19 work samples are designed to provide consistent information about the abilities they measure. As with any assessment, the results are most useful when considered alongside your student’s interests, personal style, goals, and experience.
The Highlands Ability Battery is designed to provide an objective measure of natural abilities through performance-based work samples. Unlike interest or personality assessments, which rely largely on how individuals describe themselves, the Battery asks participants to complete specific tasks and measures their performance.
The work samples are based on established principles of assessment, including reliability and validity. The Highlands approach also draws on decades of research into human abilities and individual differences.
No career assessment should be used by itself to tell a student what career to choose. That is why the Oxford Career Testing Program combines Highlands Ability Battery results with interests, personal style, and individual goals. We then examine how those different sources of information fit together to develop career and educational recommendations.
“Our experience has been that a great deal of dissatisfaction at work can be traced to having strong talents that you never use.“
– Bob McDonald, Ph.D.
“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.“
– Peter F. Drucker, Renowned author and speaker on management and leadershi
Why Natural Abilities Matter
Natural abilities are an important part of finding the right career fit.
Interests tell us what attracts your student. Personal style describes how they tend to approach people, situations, and decisions. Abilities add another important piece: the types of tasks that may come more naturally to them.
Abilities are different from learned skills. Skills can be developed through education, practice, and experience. Natural abilities reflect underlying patterns in how a person approaches and performs different kinds of tasks.
Understanding these patterns can be especially valuable for students choosing a college major or exploring careers for the first time. Your student may be interested in several very different fields, and ability testing can provide additional information for comparing those options.
The Oxford Career Testing Program does not evaluate abilities in isolation. We compare ability results with your student’s interests, personal style, goals, and preferences. Looking for agreement among these different sources of information is a key part of the Triangulation Method.
The goal is not to tell your student what they must do. It is to give your family better information for making informed decisions about careers, college majors, and educational paths.
Testimonials - What Students and Parents Say
“I would definitely recommend the Oxford Program to anybody struggling to find some direction in their life. It provided me with a list of my strong attributes and medical career options that will satisfy me physically, socially and intellectually.” – Sam Turpinski
“I was so excited when I read the report and your interpretation. I’m excited that some of the things I am thinking about seem like they’d be a good match. I’m more excited about what I can and will accomplish in this field.” – Candace Levi
“I’ve taken about every psych test you can, and this was the most accurate resulting as well as the more usable test I’ve found from my results. Interestingly, I’ve reviewed my results with friends who know me well and they all were in 100% agreement with what my results said about me.” – Vanessa Simms
“Dear Steve,
I want to briefly update you on our daughter. In her first few months of college, she had been a math major and then changed to chemistry. Neither seemed a match. That led us to you and the Oxford Program in November.
After taking the Highlands Ability Battery and having it explained by your consultant, she learned things about herself that she had never been able to put together. In addition, she was able to ask questions about multiple fields of study, including one she knew little about. The consultant was able from the test to demonstrate how her aptitude and personal style fit that particular field of study perhaps better than any of the four or five she was considering.
Well, at mid-semester, she changed majors again. Now, a year and a half later, she has earned a 4.0 and been awarded numerous scholarships and other awards. After recently offering her a scholarship for this coming year, one department leader told me that they were “Sorry they could only give her (an amount equaling 40% of her total expenses for the year). We wished we could give her a free ride.”
Her mom and I believe that the HAB and your company’s interpretation made a huge difference in helping her pursue these studies in such a successful way, and in the process saved much money that might have been spent investigating who knows how many other majors! Thanks very much!” – A Father in Virginia
Ready to Help Your Student Find the Right Career Direction?
The Oxford Career Testing Program helps students move beyond guessing about their future. By combining natural abilities, interests, personal style, and individual goals, it gives families a clearer foundation for choosing careers, college majors, and educational paths.
Whether your student is unsure what direction to pursue or is choosing among several options, the program can help your family make a more informed decision before investing years of time and money in the wrong direction.