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Know yourself (plain version)

Engineer version with all the detail: ../technical/self-assessment.md

This is a completely optional part of WorkWingman: a few short self-assessments — personality, work style, communication style, learning style — that help sharpen how the app preps you for interviews and how it helps describe you. You never have to take any of it. If you skip it entirely, nothing else in the app changes or breaks.

The most important thing: this stays on your computer

Everything you fill out here is saved only on your own machine, in the same local folder as the rest of your WorkWingman data. WorkWingman doesn't send it anywhere, doesn't put it on a server, and doesn't use it for anything except helping you inside the app.

There's exactly one exception, and it's impossible to trigger by accident: a button labeled "Export (leaves your machine)". If you click that, and only if you click that, your results get copied into a new Google Form in your own Google Drive — useful if you want a shareable copy, or want to fill it out on your phone through Google's app. Nothing about the rest of the feature turns this on automatically. If you never click that button, none of this ever leaves your laptop.

The Big Five personality test

This is the one real, science-backed part: a 50-question personality test based on decades of psychology research (it's one of the most well-studied ways of describing personality — five traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism/emotional stability). The exact question set we use is called the "IPIP Big Five," and it's published for free, for anyone, forever by a nonprofit personality-research project — no fees, no account, no catch.

You rate 50 short statements ("I am the life of the party," "I get stressed out easily," etc.) from 1 (very inaccurate) to 5 (very accurate). WorkWingman scores your answers entirely on your own machine and shows you a simple bar for each trait plus a plain-English sentence or two about what that score tends to mean. Take it, retake it whenever you want — your last answers are saved so you're not starting from scratch.

What about the Myers-Briggs test (the "16 personalities" one)?

You've probably taken some version of this before — the one that gives you a 4-letter code like "INTJ" or "ENFP." Here's the thing: the real, official Myers-Briggs test is a paid product owned by a company, and reproducing it isn't something we're allowed to do (or would want to — copying someone else's test isn't a good look).

So instead, WorkWingman does two honest things:

  1. Points you to free places that do this well — 16Personalities.com and an open-source alternative called the Open Extended Jungian Type Scales. Both are free, both give you a 4-letter type, and neither one is us pretending to be the "real" test.
  2. Lets you type in your result once you've taken one of those, so it's saved alongside everything else here.

Work style, communication style, and learning style

Three more short (8-question-ish) preference quizzes, written by us specifically for WorkWingman — not copies of any commercial test. They ask simple things like "do you like taking charge of decisions" or "do diagrams help you learn faster than reading." Answer honestly, get a one-line summary of your leaning (e.g. "Direct & concise" or "Visual" learner), and that's it.

One of these is worth a quick explanation: the learning-style one is inspired by a well-known idea (do you learn best by seeing, hearing, reading, or doing) called VARK. The actual VARK questionnaire is copyrighted and we're not allowed to copy it — so ours is our own set of questions built around the same general idea, not a copy of VARK's actual test.

Why bother with any of this?

None of it is required, and the app works completely fine if you never open this page. But if you do take it, the results quietly feed two things down the road: sharper interview prep (so practice questions and coaching can account for how you actually communicate and work) and better self-marketing material (so your resume/cover-letter voice can lean into traits that are genuinely true about you, instead of generic buzzwords).