Frequently Asked Questions

What is a WAYA™ profile?

This assessment is designed for college seniors asking “What career should I choose?”

It measures twenty different job traits and attitudes, using 133 questions. The resulting profile tells a student where they differ significantly from others. The theory is that too many other tests force every trait into black and white extremes. They label you as “articulate” or “shy,” etc., on a number of traits. But we usually fall into the averages, that “bell-shaped curve,” for most traits. These characteristics are less important. Irrelevant, even.

The common approach, black and white, forcing every trait into an extreme, also makes other methods non-repeatable. When a test-taker scores in the 49th percentile, becoming classified as “relaxed,” for one silly example, while another scores in the 51st percentile, and gets labeled as “energetic,” well, that’s plain stupid. They’re way too close. And it’s just as likely that those two will reverse themselves in a second taking of that same test. Take a nap. Have a cup of coffee. Score like a different person.

Come on! That’s no help to someone asking “What career should I choose?”

But discovering the extreme traits, those little places where a student differs from 95% of college seniors across the county, now that matters. Not just to you. This helps you go after the employers who’ll value you. That’s what the WAYA™ profiler does. No other test, to our knowledge, uses this methodology. That’s why it’s patent pending and trademarked. No other test, to our knowledge, specifically targets college seniors.

Your results are anonymously added to the data pool, and the norms are adjusted every month, depending on shifts discovered in the average students’ responses.

Can a WAYA™ profile help me if my target is a specific occupation, location or industry?

Absolutely. And your WAYA™ profile will show whether you’re going to be happier, and do better, in a large business or a smaller group. (That’s another thing, a critical thing, that no other career assessment even thinks about.)

You asked three different questions, by the way. A specific occupation is one kind of job search. Targeting a certain town or region is another. And a favorite industry is a third.

“What career should I choose?” You can approach the question from any of these three criteria — but all go quicker after the WAYA™ analysis.

Are you serious about that guarantee?

Yup. This WAYA™ profiler, you see, is what they call an “out-of-the-box” approach, although some folks who should know seem to think it’s a breakthrough. Who knows? We’ll see with more time and will constantly be updating the test as more and more eager job-seekers, upperclassmen mostly, with some recent grads, take it. But, we’re also eager to learn from those who feel disappointed. Hence the guarantee.

How was the WAYA™ profile first tested?

We ran ads in fourteen campus newspapers and web sites, randomly scattered across the country, in schools of various sizes. 200 test-takers set the first norms, and caused rewrites for a dozen of the questions. Because the WAYA™ profiler seeks to find only those areas where a student shows extreme differences, despite this small first sample size, the results became stable fairly quickly.

These results were reviewed by employment executives, college placement employees, recruiters and professional test-writers. Then we did another rewrite and put it up on the web for more takers.

The latest takers, interestingly, showed more variations from the first. This was probably because they were paying takers instead of paid takers. So we adjusted again, slightly. The WAYA profiler you’ll take now came out of that process.