CashCrunch Careers ~ a Crew review

Many families include a student who would like to have a solid answer for the question “What do you want to do after high school?” Adults looking for a career change often face the same dilemma. Deciding what area to pursue in college can be a daunting task. CashCrunch Careers from CashCrunch Games hopes to help those searching for these answers find them. Arlene and I both took their career assessment as a part of this review for the Homeschool Review Crew.

CashCrunch Careers combines US Department of Labor research with corporate recruitment tools in one platform. The goal of CashCrunch Careers (from the YouTube video on their home page) assessment : "Matches your personality attributes to specific jobs."

How does this all work, and does it work? To begin, each person will need to take the assessment. This usually takes about 10-15 minutes. It is a personality survey that asks you to truthfully choose from two words at a time. Choose the one that most reflects who you are, not who you wish to be. If you need synonyms for the words to help you distinguish, you can hover your mouse over the word. Choose from 75 pairs of words: likable or adaptable, understanding or honest, etc. 

At the end of your career/ personality survey you will receive a two page CashCrunch Career report that you can view online, or download and print. Arlene and I both viewed ours online, and then printed a copy to keep. The report includes four sections:

- Career Work Styles

- Motivators & De-motivators

- Career Attributes

- Career Match

The first three sections are information that describes your personality and the fourth one is designed to point you to the best careers for your personality/ career attributes. This fourth section has clickable links to lead you to more information about the various careers recommended.

For both Arlene and myself the first three sections were spot-on. Arlene is a high school senior who was looking to see if there was a career other than what she is currently planning to pursue that might be an even better fit. For myself, I wanted to see what the report would recommend since I am considering a career change once Arlene graduates.

Both of us were disappointed by the information provided in the fourth section (Career Match). The report reads: The purpose of this section is to match your Work Styles and Attributes to careers based on 10 years of research conducted by the US Department of Labor. By this stated purpose you would think that since Arlene and I had vastly different reports in the Work Styles and Career Attributes sections that we would have different jobs recommended. We did not. All 20 of the Matching jobs on both of our reports were exactly the same.

When I contacted the creator and asked him about this he replied:

The career categories for most people will be the same, even though the reports should suggest huge differences. 

In each of the careers, the jobs can vary quite considerably. For example, in the publishing world you will need editors, writers and graphic designers. In the police force there are a number of different personalities required depending on their roles. Some will rise to the ranks in leadership, be detectives, others will follow a more scientific route into CSI and so on. The purpose is to show that within career categories, there are a number of different roles for different personalities.

The ranking is based purely on your inherent traits. As mentioned before, you could work in the same career field but just do different jobs. 

I hope this addresses your concerns.

So I went looking through the reports and links again to see if I had missed something. We were hoping to find a breakdown of individual jobs under each category, that variation we were told about. In the top career listed for both of us: General and Operations Managers, there were no sub-categories. How is a high school student supposed to know where to start their college courses if they are told they will make a great CEO or COO someday but the reality is they need to find an entry-level or mid-level job to prepare for? We did not find the variety of different roles within each field we were hoping to find.

Of our 20 career recommendations, all of them said: manager, administrator, or director except one: Farmers and Ranchers. Something just did not ring quite true for either of us with this, so we dug deeper. We compared our Career Attributes with those listed for each of these 20 recommendations. For some of them there were a solid three of five that matched, but for the top recommendation for me there was only ONE of the attributes listed that was in my report, and for Arlene’s second place recommendation she had NONE of the attributes listed for the position. Two of Arlene's recommendation had no matching attributes and for four of them she only had one.

While we feel that the beginning part of this CashCrunch Careers assessment could be a valuable tool, overall it falls short of the mark it claims to aim for. As it is right now we give it a B- grade. More time needs to be spent on improving the career match section. It should provide stepping-stone positions to consider that could lead to high-level managerial or other top-level jobs in the various industries for those whose career attributes do truly fit the position. We are hoping the creators will consider expanding the Career Match section to better serve these areas of concern.