Here’s a thought on what you can do if you have a computer tower lying around that you no longer need.  This is something I’d actually like to try.  While it may cost you some spare parts (which can be found on Amazon), the Linux Ubuntu OS is free to download and install.  I recommend installing from a USB drive or download and ISO and burn it to disk.

At the end of a job interview today, I was asked by the interviewer to fill out an assessment to ‘see how I would fit in’ with the company.  What the interviewer did not tell me that this would be an assessment of my skills by a company I’d never heard of.  While I wasn’t afraid of taking an assessment, there was one major red flag that instantly came up:  I’m not a test taker.  I never have been and never will be good at taking tests.

Smarterer.comis designed with the intent of providing you and potential employers with an idea of what you actually know versus what you say you know on your resume or in conversation with people.  The site is intending to replace the resume, but I question its validity for the following reason:  As I was taking the tests for HTML, CSS And jQuery, each question asked by Smarterer.com was ‘dated’, with an element box that told the testee who wrote the question and how long ago it was written.  This essentially makes it a wiki and invalidates the questions, even if they are legitimate questions.  From an academic standpoint, there is no was to determine if the questions on Smarterer.com are peer reviewed and actually accurate.  It allows the test takers to rate the question and even rewrite the question.  It was not clear if the questions are reviewed by editors prior to going live.  There was something with a cutesy name that suggested it was a testbed for new questions, but that just raised another red flag for me.

So I scored myself as a beginner with CSS And jQuery, even though I’m very good at CSS.  The questions assume that you are memorizing commands.  It won’t rate your ability to use Dreamweaver, which makes using CSS/CSS3 very easy, but there is a test for that program as well (which I scored 780 out of 800 on).  I scored proficient in Photoshop and HTML5, but only familiar with HMTL.

Here’s another red flag:  Smarterer.com has a section dedicated to games.  That’s right, you can test your trivia knowledge of Angry Birds and World of Warcraft.  Don’t tell the Trekkies or Star Wars fans this, or soon Smarterer will be flooded with fandom tests.  Or maybe that will further prove my point that Smarterer cannot be a valid way to test the knowledge of a potential employee.

So, will my ‘test scores’ help me or hurt me?  It’s hard to say.  Anyone who has seen my work will attest to my skill and ability.  They can tell you that I can get the job done.  However if you, the employer, are going to rely on this testing site to verify my abilities, which would have the potential of invalidating my degree and years of experience, then maybe I do not need your job. 

18differentways:

1x06 The Makeover

Back when Disney gave a shit about girl’s self esteem