Skills
An 8-item assessment measuring your generalized self-efficacy - the belief in your ability to handle difficult situations, solve problems, and accomplish goals.
Read each of the eight statements and rate how much you agree with it as a description of yourself. There are no right or wrong answers - answer honestly.
Self-efficacy is your belief in your own ability to organize and carry out the actions needed to handle difficult situations and reach your goals. It is not a measure of how skilled you actually are; it is your confidence that you can cope, solve problems, and persist when things get hard. That belief matters because it shapes the goals you set, the effort you invest, and how you respond to setbacks, often as much as raw ability does.
This 8-item test measures generalized self-efficacy, the broad sense of competence that carries across many areas of life rather than confidence in one specific skill. It takes about 3 minutes. You rate how true each statement is of you, and your result is compared with other people, so you see where your self-efficacy stands among them rather than a raw number in isolation.
This test produces a single overall self-efficacy score rather than separate sub-scales. Generalized self-efficacy is treated as one coherent disposition: a stable confidence that you can deal with novel or demanding situations through effort and persistence. The eight items each tap a facet of that confidence, such as managing unexpected problems, finding solutions, and sticking with a goal in the face of opposition, and combine into one band-scored result.
Self-efficacy is best understood as belief, not capacity. Two people of equal skill can differ sharply in how confident they feel, and that difference predicts real behavior: those higher in self-efficacy attempt more, give up less easily, and recover faster from failure. The flip side is that self-efficacy can be miscalibrated in either direction, and the report reads your score as a reflection of your current confidence rather than a fixed measure of competence.
Self-efficacy is central to Albert Bandura social-cognitive theory, which holds that beliefs about personal capability are among the strongest determinants of motivation and action. Decades of research link higher self-efficacy to greater effort, persistence, resilience after setbacks, and better performance and wellbeing across education, work, health behavior change, and coping with stress. The construct is one of the most extensively studied in psychology, with a large body of evidence behind its predictive value.
This test follows the generalized self-efficacy tradition exemplified by the widely used General Self-Efficacy Scale of Schwarzer and Jerusalem, an 8-item measure translated into dozens of languages that gives consistent scores in language after language, and by the New General Self-Efficacy Scale of Chen, Gully, and Eden, which demonstrated strong reliability and construct validity. Your score is compared with other people, and the detailed report is generated from your scored profile by strict scoring rules. This is an educational self-assessment, not a clinical instrument, and it does not diagnose anything.
Read more about our standards: How our tests are built and validated.
Yes. Taking the 8-item test is free, with no account required to start, and your free result shows your result band. The full report, free with an account, adds the exact score and percentile, interprets your score band, and offers practical, research-based ways to strengthen your sense of competence.
Self-efficacy is about capability - your belief that you can do specific things and handle challenges. Self-esteem is about worth - how much you value and like yourself overall. They are related but distinct: someone can feel highly capable in a domain yet have low global self-esteem, or vice versa. This test measures the capability side, generalized across situations.
Your score shows where your self-reported confidence in handling difficulties places you among other people, for example higher than about 70 of every 100 people. A higher score suggests you generally expect to cope with and overcome challenges through effort. Because it is a belief measure rather than a skills test, read it as a reflection of your current confidence, which can be higher or lower than your actual ability.
Yes, and the research is specific about how. The strongest source is mastery experience: succeeding at progressively harder tasks. Other reliable sources are watching similar people succeed, encouragement from credible others, and learning to read your stress signals as readiness rather than threat. Setting reachable sub-goals and accumulating small wins builds self-efficacy more durably than pep talks alone.
No. It is an educational self-assessment, not a clinical instrument, and it does not diagnose any condition. A low score is not a diagnosis and a high score is not a clean bill of health. If low confidence or anxiety is interfering with your daily life, a qualified professional can help in ways a questionnaire cannot.
Generalized self-efficacy is a focused, unidimensional construct, so a well-chosen short scale measures it reliably. The 8-item format follows the widely validated General Self-Efficacy Scale, which gives consistent scores across many countries and languages despite its brevity. The trade-off is that it gives one overall reading rather than breaking confidence down by life area.
Created and reviewed to professional scientific standards. See how our tests are built and validated.