Overview
Choose a medical specialty the smart way. Our testing will point the way.
Did you know?
40 – 50% of practicing physicians surveyed would pick a different medical specialty if given the chance. 80 percent of medical students in a Glaxo study believed they did not have enough valid information about their talents and options to base a decision of medical specialty. Over 70% of people in the healthcare practitioner profession surveyed in the Oxford CareerFitNow Analysis tool indicated they felt they weren’t using their natural talents in their work.
The bottom line is that choosing the wrong medical specialty and career costs you countless setbacks and frustration.
The Oxford Medical Career Aptitudes ProgramTM uses a systematic combination of scientific testing and assessments to help you choose the best medical specialty for you. Our proprietary data, research, and triangulation matching process assures research-validated accuracy and confidence in ranking your profile against 30+ medical specialties.
Would you like to know?
- Do you have the basic talents to be a doctor?
- Should you be a specialist or generalist?
- Medical specialties…Pediatric oncology or Otolaryngology? Immunology or Infectious Diseases?
- Research or patient care?
- Hospital- or office-based?
Our testing program…
- Uncovers your natural, inborn abilities
- Pinpoints your ideal medical specialty path
- Builds your self-confidence
- Can offer you a strategic advantage in landing your top choice residency or being accepted into your preferred medical school
Who is it for?
- High school students who want to understand if they have the right profile to succeed in the medical profession.
- Medical school students who want to achieve the highest levels of success and satisfaction in the medical professions by aligning their strongest talent with their career.
- Practicing physicians who want to diagnose any natural ability/personality conflicts to achieve more satisfaction within or outside the medical professions.
- We measure your talents, interests and personal style: the areas where you would be your best. The Oxford Program is very different from the rudimentary career tests you may have taken in the past. Most career tests are based on your personality or interests and you can sway them with your choices. And just because you are interested in something doesn’t mean you have any talent for it.Some people hesitate to take our tests because they might “fail.” It is impossible to pass or fail our program. In many cases, a low score on a particular test may be preferable to a high score. Satisfaction in a job depends not on how many aptitudes you possess but on the combination of high and low scores, and whether that aptitude pattern is used in your work.
How It Works
STEP 1: TESTING
PART 1: Personal Style Assessment. You will start by completing a specially designed intake questionnaire about your interests and preferences related to careers in general.
PART 2: The Highlands Ability Battery. The Highlands Ability Battery™ is the gold standard in testing career-related abilities.
The Battery is a series of 19 timed work-samples that measure and define your natural abilities. This is not like any other test you’ve ever taken. There are no grades or no good or bad results. Each work-sample measures a particular aptitude and you’ll be amazed how much they reveal about you.
Opposed to interest or personality testing, you cannot influence the Highlands Ability Battery to produce false results.
How accurate is it? This is not like the aptitude testing from years ago, or the tests available in certain books out there. The information and suggestions that it makes are HIGHLY ACCURATE. The testing is psychometrically valid and reliable. The minimum reliability standard for the 19 tests that make up The
Highlands Ability Battery is r = . 80.
After you complete the Battery, you will receive a 33-page report describing your results in detail.
PART 3: Oxford CareerFitNow Analysis. The Oxford CareerFITNow Analysis will analyze your interest patterns, providing a window into your personality and “role in life”.
In addition to your abilities discovered with the Highlands Ability Battery, this assessment allows us to understand what fields satisfy your interests and will provide you the motivation to be happy and successful.
You receive your CareerFITNow report which compares your natural inclinations to the results of people who are successfully employed in professions and provide recommendations on specialties matching your talents and interests.
STEP 2: MATCHING PROCESS
After you have completed the testing, your results will be used to create a report which explains what they mean, along with profile matches.
STEP 3: FEEDBACK SESSIONS
After the testing is complete, you will have a follow-up feedback and interpretation session with the Oxford Program founder, Steve Bohler, to discuss the results.
Discover where YOUR excellence, success, and happiness will be!
The Highlands Ability BatteryTM (THAB) is the gold standard among tools assessing human abilities or aptitudes.
The Battery consists of 19 different worksamples. Each worksample is timed to measure the speed with which the individual is able to do a particular series of similar tasks. The individual’s score on each worksample establishes whether a particular task is more or less easy for that individual. Shown together on a personal profile and bar chart, the scores achieved by each individual reveal patterns or “clusters” of abilities which require analysis by a skilled interpreter. Once these patterns or “clusters” are understood, the individual is helped to guide his life and work into more productive and satisfying channels.
More than any other test, it helps you understand the type(s) of work you should pursue and the types you should definitely not pursue.
In October, 2002, 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 accurate is it?
This is not like the aptitude testing from years ago, or the tests available in certain books out there. The information and suggestions that it makes are HIGHLY ACCURATE. Many medical, technology, business, and science students use this aptitude testing to choose an area of specialization. Businesses use it to choose the top candidates for important positions. Entrepreneurs use it to determine the type of business they’re most likely to be successful in. The testing is psychometrically valid and reliable. The minimum reliability standard for the 19 tests that make up The Highlands Ability Battery™ is r = . 80.
Some have described the Highlands Ability Battery as the Myers-Briggs “on steroids.” It is like getting an MRI for a painful injury instead of a traditional X-Ray.
A study conducted by the Chauncey group, an ETS affiliate in 2002 confirmed that the norms assigned by Highlands to the Ability Battery were essentially replicated over 4,307 individual test records.
Validity is the certainty with which we can ascribe a contextual significance to a given score on a given test with a given person, i.e., the confidence with which we can interpret any given test result. In simple terms, the test should measure what it claims to measure.
Validity can be estimated in a variety of ways for tests of abilities similar to the Highlands Ability Battery. Validity research has been an ongoing function of the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, forerunner of the Highlands Battery, for over 50 years and of The Highlands Company since its inception in the early 1990s. All together, hundreds of studies have demonstrated the essential validity of the individual worksamples composing the Highlands Ability Battery. Many of the individual components in assessments administered by other companies and laboratories are similar in construction to related worksamples in the Highlands Battery, and it is possible to draw parallel results by measuring one instrument against another. Because of the similarities in the structure of these other assessments, it is also possible to relate the overall findings among them.
“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 leadership
Why Abilities?
Why abilities? Why should they be tested?
Because effectively using your innate talents may be the difference between greatness and mediocrity.
Whether they are called abilities, talents, innate qualities or aptitudes, they are instilled in each of us at birth. They are those essential elements which combine in each of us to define what we do easily and well. Some talents are so firmly implanted in some individuals as to control virtually every moment of their lives. Mozart was impelled to compose his extraordinary music from the age of five. Dickens had finished The Pickwick Papers by the time he was 24. Einstein wrote his first essay on the theory of relativity at the age of sixteen.
But few of us are embryonic Mozarts or Einsteins. All of us are a combination of talents, some more compelling than others, no one of them so predominant as to drive everything we do. What separates and distinguishes us from other individuals is the way in which our unique abilities are patterned or configured in each of us. Research shows that abilities come together for everyone in a definable pattern. We are able to determine this pattern once the individual reaches the age of fourteen.
One combination of aptitudes makes the consummate salesperson. Another combination describes a person that enjoys computer network administration. Another combination explains why a person enjoys one part of management, but not the rest.
Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things easily and quickly. They have little to do with knowledge or culture, or education, or even interests. They have to do with heredity. Musical talent and artistic talent are examples of such aptitudes.
It has been our experience that people tend to be more satisfied and successful in occupations that challenge their aptitudes and do not demand aptitudes that they lack.
At the core of discovering your “natural vocation” is understanding your natural, driving abilities. Research over 40-50 years shows that most sources of job unhappiness stem from natural abilities not being used, or being forced to perform tasks for which you do not have the natural abilities.
If you choose a new career without a knowledge of your innate abilities, you have a relatively high probability of winding up back in a career that you find boring, frustrating, or unfulfilling.
- Very few people know their natural abilities — that is, what they are good at without having developed a skill for something.
- Just because you’re “good at” your job doesn’t mean it fits your natural abilities.
PEOPLE ENJOY DOING WORK THEY DO WELL NATURALLY
Abilities are distinct from skills. Skills are function-driven capacities acquired over time, practice and experience. Abilities are innate. Manual-dexterity, for example, is an ability; violin-concertizing is a resulting skill. We are happiest and most satisfied when we make maximum use of our abilities. An individual may develop the skills to practice law, for example, but if she doesn’t have the inborn talents which make the practice of law easy and satisfying, she will find her work unrewarding (and, even, as in the case of many lawyers, frustrating). When we apply our abilities to our study or work, we do our tasks better.
The purpose of a valid test of innate abilities is to determine in a reliable way the ease with which an individual can perform the tasks which measure those abilities. The Highlands Battery consists of nineteen different tasks or worksamples. Together, they tell us what pattern of abilities lies in each of us and how our abilities can be used most easily and effectively.
Testimonials
“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; which is priceless living in our world today.” – Sammy Shams, Medical Student
“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; more important. I’m more excited about what I can and will accomplish in this field.” – Candace Levi
“I already have recommended the HAB to other friends who aren’t even in medicine. I’ve taken about every psych test you can (when I took a Testing class in college) 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. It was also VERY interesting to compare my results with a friend who’d taken the same test. I wish everyone had to take this test whether during college years or now. I think the world would be a more efficient and happier place for it if we could all better use our skills/abilities.” – Vanessa Simms
“Dear Steve,
I want to briefly update you on our daughter. In her first few months of college in 2006, 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