Abilities are what you're naturally good at.  The trick is knowing exactly what they are. That is what The Highlands Ability Battery™ is designed to tell you. Natural abilities are a way of talking about how you are hard-wired. Your natural talents and abilities are fully developed around age 14. From then on, they typically do not change throughout a person's working life. When you take The Highlands Ability Battery™ at age 25 (or 45), it will tell you exactly what your natural gifts and talents are. As your career develops and changes, your natural abilities will not change. Knowing them now can give you a way to predict what kinds of work will be easy and fun for you to do, and what kind of work will be laborious and miserably difficult. Abilities do not typically change. Practicing an ability does not make it better. Neglecting an ability does not make it worse. You can have a strong ability your entire life and never even know it, if you never use it. This happens with great regularity and is a tragic loss to the person as well as to the organization he or she works for. By measuring your abilities objectively, you can know for sure exactly what your abilities are and can start to use the greatest gifts and talents in your life. HOW DO YOU MEASURE ABILITIES? The only way to measure abilities objectively is by means of worksamples. A worksample is an actual task that has been specially constructed to use one ability and one ability only. No prior education, training, or experience gives anyone an advantage. If you know your true strengths, you can use them more effectively and more consistently. The Highlands Ability Battery™ can tell you how you learn best, how you solve problems most effectively, how you manage best, how you sell best or how to use your natural talents to do whatever you do better. Research on abilities goes back over 70 years. The Highlands Program™ has conducted a number of far reaching studies on abilities. Research has consistently shown that when people are in work in which they use their natural abilities, they enjoy the work more and are also more successful. Some people feel that they probably already know what their abilities are. However, this is rarely completely true. School and work typically use only a few natural abilities. It's exceedingly difficult to tell from grades, scholastic tests, or job performance just what your real abilities are. You could have a very strong natural talent for something and never know it. Knowing exactly what your strongest natural abilities are helps you work in a way that utilizes them best. WHAT CAN ABILITIES TELL YOU? Knowing and understanding natural abilities is almost immediately useful for managers and executives, as well as for students and people just beginning their careers. Not only can they understand how they work and learn best; they also find it easier to understand how others work best. Managers often find they are able to trace problems that people are having in the workplace to natural ability patterns that are being improperly used. Knowing and understanding abilities is the first step in gaining a Personal Vision for the future. This one factor - a positive, Personal Vision for the future - has been found by researchers to be the most powerful predictor of both satisfaction and success that they have ever found - more powerful than intelligence, socio-economic background or even educational level Some people wonder whether The Highlands Ability Battery™ will show that they do not have any natural abilities. This is literally impossible. There is no such thing as a bad ability pattern. Every pattern of scores on the ability worksamples describes roles and functions that will be easy for you. Also every pattern of scores will describe roles and functions that will be more difficult. Abilities never tell you that you can't do something. They never tell you that you have to do something. They only tell you what's going to be easy for you to do-in terms of natural abilities-and what's going to be relatively more difficult. By finding out about your natural abilities, you can find out how you work best and most easily, no matter what you do and no matter how often you change what you do.