What is Aptitude?
Aptitude is an innate quality or strength that helps one perform a task with certain competency. Another word for aptitude is ability. We are born with certain set of abilities or aptitude whether we explore all of them or not, is a different matter. Aptitude can be enhanced with skill. Skill is the knowledge we acquire from outside.
There are many variations
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout
How can we know about our own Aptitude?
The best way of knowing about your own aptitude is to explore as many areas as possible. Through the course of life, we ourselves come to know some of our strong and weak areas. But the most scientific way of quantifying our current level of abilities is to take a psychometric test for Aptitude. These usually measure areas that are important in various career like:
Verbal ability
Reasoning ability
Numerical ability
Clerical ability
Closure ability
Spatial ability
Mechanical ability
How does knowing about Aptitude help?
Knowing about one’s own aptitude is a great help in the course of life, especially when planning or changing careers. If we know that we have an aptitude for a particular area, then we can use that to further our career goals. Or, if we are interested in a particular career and know that we lack the aptitude required, we can work more towards developing those skills that will overcome our lack of ability.
Choosing the right career that aligns with our aptitude and interest is very important as our career is an important part of our life. We spend a major part of our life in that area. For example: If a person chooses to become a production engineer, then her life revolves around factories, machines, workers etc. If a person chooses to be a teacher, then she will have to deal with students, teaching, corrections etc. If you choose a career for which you don’t have an aptitude or an interest the work seems like a chore and you might want to give up.
Remember: We can achieve anything with hard work and determination.
Difference between Aptitude and Skill
Some people sing very well even without any training in music. We would say that their ‘aptitude’ for singing is high. The person with a good aptitude for singing may choose to treat it as a hobby and be content with singing ‘well’ among friends and family. But if she/he wants to use this good aptitude/high ability to make a career in singing then she/he needs to add skill to it. Which means she/he will have to learn music, train, practice etc. This learning, training, practicing is called skill or in other words the ‘hard work’ that we put in a particular field.
We can learn any skill that we want. But if it is backed by high or averagely high ability or aptitude we can easily excel in that field.
Many a time a person with average aptitude in a particular area can outshine a person with high aptitude in that area based on sheer hard work and training.
According to Gladwell (2008)] and Colvin (2008)*, often it is difficult to set apart an outstanding performance due merely to talent or stemming from hard training
FAQ's
(Frequently Asked Questions)
No, this is a psychometric test for aptitude.
Yes. Different tests have different time.
When you don’t have much time to think, your true instinctive response comes out and a psychometric test is designed to find that.
The test is designed in such a way that not everyone will be able to complete all the questions in all the tests within the given time. You just have to answer as many questions as possible within the given time frame. As there are no negative marks for wrong answer, you can make a calculated guess as how you guess also depends on your ability.
There are many variations
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout