Discussion 4 Fall 2022

Chapter 10 Assessment in Career Counseling and Development

Things to Remember

The major approaches used in the career assessment process, including some of the most important quantitative and qualitative assessment techniques

The criteria that should be used when selecting assessment approaches

The strategies to be used when interpreting assessment results

The differences between modern (logical positivism) and postmodern approaches to assessment

Some type of assessment must be an integral part of the career development and career counseling process. Career assessment may range from self-estimates of skills, interests, and values by the client to the administration of a standardized battery of inventories and tests. Assessment techniques and devices may be paper-and-pencil inventories and exercises, computerized administered tests, and/or online inventories that are essentially self-administered. After the assessment is complete, results may be self-interpreted, counselor interpreted, or interpreted by computer programs. In fact, there is an almost unlimited number of assessment instruments. A Counselor’s Guide to Career Assessment Instruments (Whitfield, Feller, & Wood, 2009) includes professional reviews of more than 60 career assessment instruments and lists nearly 200 additional instruments that are not reviewed. More recently, Wood and Hays (2013) produced an update of this invaluable guide. Some assessment approaches may not include tests or inventories, particularly those chosen by postmodern counselors. They may opt for qualitative devices, such as occupational genograms or card sorts.

Contrast the assessment processes you might use when counseling a senior citizen looking for a part-time job to supplement her income with an 18-year-old woman who is looking for her first job. Traditional instruments that were developed to help young workers would be of little use with a mature woman who may have held a number of jobs, raised children, and served as a volunteer in her church and in civic clubs. It is likely that you would examine her life experiences to determine her interests, values, and past work experience to ascertain her abilities. The number of hours she wants to work and the amount of money she needs to supplement her income will be important things to assess. Formal assessment using traditional interest and values inventories is more likely to be included in the career assessment process of the 18-year-old. Likes and dislikes of various subjects and performance in various subject matter areas may provide clues to values, interests, and abilities as well. The principle is simple: One assessment strategy will not fit all clients.

The first model of vocational development (Parsons, 1909) emphasized the importance of personal analysis in promoting self-understanding and as a basis for career selection. Career counselors still adhere to the idea that self-understanding and knowledge of occupations are at the foundation of making informed career choices. However, today’s career counselors are much more likely to explore personal factors, lifestyle concerns, and spiritual issues (Andersen & Vanderhey, 2006) in the process as a means of determining contextual variables that should be included in the decision-making process. In the section that follows, some of the factors that may be assessed in the career counseling process are defined.

Personal-Psychological Characteristics

Much of the work to identify psychological characteristics has focused on what most researchers call traits. Several of these are discussed in this section.

Aptitude

Aptitudes are defined as specific capacities and abilities required of an individual to learn or adequately perform a task or job duty. Recent research suggests that aptitude refers to specific psychological factors that contribute in varying degrees to success in occupations. It is a capacity or potential that has stability, unity, and independence. However, the developers of O*NET identified 52 abilities (U.S. Department of Labor, 1998). Ultimately the O*NET development team identified nine “abilities” that are in fact aptitudes as defined here:

Verbal Ability Clerical Perception

Arithmetic Reasoning Motor Coordination

Computation Finger Dexterity

Spatial Ability Manual Dexterity

Form Perception

Not all of these aptitudes are required for skill acquisition and performance in all jobs.

The Ability Explorer (Harrington & Harrington, 2006) uses three types of ability self-rating to derive an abilities profile. The Ability Profiler is available from the O*NET Resources Center. It is a traditional, paper-and-pencil measure. Self-estimates of abilities are also useful and have considerable psychometric support (Melvin & Hale, 2013).

Interests

Perhaps the most-used type of information to determine the appropriateness of occupations for individuals is interests: likes or preferences, or, stated somewhat differently, the things that they enjoy. More than half a century ago, Super (1957) described four types of interests varying primarily with the method of assessment:

Expressed interests: Verbal statements or claims of interest

Manifest interests: Interests exhibited through actions and participation

Inventoried interests: Estimates of interest based on responses to a set of questions concerning likes and dislikes (e.g., the Strong Interest Inventory)

Tested interests: Interests revealed under controlled situations

As can be seen in Super’s taxonomy, interest may be assessed in a number of ways. Although interests are most frequently assessed by using psychometric devices, stated or expressed interests are as valid a predictor of factors such as occupational choice, satisfaction, and achievement as are inventoried interests (Whitney, 1969). However, when individuals involved in career decision making have limited experiences, the likelihood that either stated or inventoried interests will be good predictors of occupational behavior is reduced. Moreover, interest measures are aimed at quantifying what individuals like or prefer, not why they like or prefer them. Personality and values measures are more likely to provide this type of information.

Personality

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) appears to be the personality inventory most often chosen by career centers on college campuses (Melvin & Hale, 2013). Both Holland (1997) and Super (1990) identify personality as a key factor in vocational choice and career development. However, although Holland claims that interest inventories are personality inventories, his assertion is probably not accepted outside the realm of career development, and his instruments are typically classified as interest inventories, because they measure likes and preferences (cf. Whitfield, Feller, & Wood, 2009; Wood & Hays, 2013). Personality is typically defined as the sum total of an individual’s beliefs, perceptions, emotions, and attitudes and may be extended to include the behavior of the individual as well. Historically, the role of personality in career choice has been secondary to interests, but this may not be the case on college campuses (Melvin & Hale, 2013). The MBTI has led a resurgence in the use of personality measures in occupational selection. It is likely that many of the millions of people who have taken the MBTI did so as a means to facilitate their career choice and development. This interest in the MBTI as a career assessment instrument was fueled partially by the career data collected with this instrument, which are presented in the appendix to the technical manual of the MBTI (Myers & McCaulley, 1998). The MBTI yields four bipolar scales:

Extroversion ________ Introversion

Sensing __________ Intuition

Thinking __________ Feeling

Judging __________ Perceiving

The personality profile resulting from the MBTI consists of the highest scores on Introversion versus Extroversion, Sensing versus Intuition, Thinking versus Feeling, and Judging versus Perceiving. Thus, each individual is categorized as one of 16 personality types, such as ENFP or ISTJ. Each personality type has certain preferences, including preferences for work environments. For example, approximately half the individuals in the helping professions surveyed by Myers and McCaulley (1998) have NF in their personality profile. This means that their preferred way of taking in data is through intuition versus the five senses, or Ss, and their preferred manner of