Assessment in Career Counseling

1. Assessment in Career Counseling Chapter 9

2. Assessing Individual Differences • Interests • Abilities/skills • Values • Integrative Career Assessment Programs

3. Interests • Often used in career counseling because they can be helpful in describing individual’s general occupational interests • Counselors can also assess interests by using measures of expressed and manifest interests • Interest inventories have been found to promote career exploration and connect the client’s interests to specific occupations • Some common interest inventories • Strong Interest Inventory • Career Assessment Inventory • Self-Directed Search • Kuder instruments • Kuder Occupational Interest Survey • Kuder General Interest Survey • Other instruments

4. Interests(cont.) • Strong Interest Inventory (Sonnay, Morris, Schaubhut, & Thompson, 2005) • One of the most widely used, researched, and respected instruments; not only in career counseling, but also counseling in general • Compares individuals’ responses to items with the response patterns of people in different occupations • Appropriate for high school students, college students, and adults

5. Abilities/Skills • Assessment of abilities and skills are often conducted to identify occupational possibilities in which the client could be successful • Aptitude tests are often used in career counseling because they are good predictors of occupational success • Important for counselors to verify aptitude assessment results with other information (e.g., interest inventory) • Some common abilities/skills inventories • Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery; Differential Aptitude Test • Campbell Interest and Skills Survey • Skills Confidence Inventory • Self-estimates of abilities

6. Values • Work values are more highly correlated than interest with work satisfaction (Rounds, 1990) • No inventory is inclusive of all possible values • Clients may value something that is not assessed on the instrument being used • Counselors need to supplement the use of a values inventory with an exploration of other possible values • Some common values instruments • Minnesota Importance Questionnaire • O*NET Work Importance Profiler • Values Scale • Salience Inventory

7. Integrative Career Assessment Programs • These programs combine interests, abilities, and values assessments • Kuder Career Planning System • COPSystem • Integrated assessment and career information systems • These systems include multiple assessments as well as an integration of occupational information • DISCOVER Program • SIGI-Plus

8. Integrating Assessment Information • Career Development Assessment and Counseling Approach (C-DAC) • Integrates the results from multiple career assessments: • Adult Career Concerns Inventory • Career Development Inventory • Strong Interest Inventory • Values Scale • Salience Inventory • Informal assessments/exercises • Portfolio assessment

9. Career Choice Process • Career Decision-Making • Career Maturity

10. Career Decision-Making • Career Decision Scale • Provides a measure of career indecision, but it does not indicate the source or the type of indecision • My Vocational Situation • Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale • Measures the confidence individuals have in their ability to make career decisions • Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire • Constructed to measure a theory-based taxonomy of decision-making difficulties

11. Career Maturity • Career maturity is the “extent to which the individual has mastered the vocational tasks, including both knowledge and attitudinal components, appropriate to his or her stage of career development” (Betz, 1988, p. 80). • Measures the client’s level of readiness for mastering career development tasks • Career Development Inventory • Adult Career Concerns Inventory • Career Maturity Inventory

12. Qualitative Career Assessment • According to Goldman (1990): • Qualitative assessment is not standardized tests that usually yield quantitative scores and norm-based interpretation. • Tends to foster a more active role for the client rather than a more passive interpretation of the results provided. • Emphasizes a holistic study of the individual compared with relying on more discrete measure of human constructs such as interest, abilities, and personalities. • Also important to assess and examine the relational influence in career assessment because work and important relationships are complexly interwoven constructs, and sometimes relational influences are ignored (Schultheiss, 2005).

13. Qualitative Career Assessment • Qualitative career assessment is not a set of specific assessment instruments or techniques. • Savickas (1993) recommends assisting clients in inventing a workable personal framework for their lives that includes their work role. • Client and counselor can act as coauthors in: • Authoring a coherent, continuous, and credible career story • Identifying themes and tensions within the story lines and attributing meaning to those concepts • Developing a narrative or plan to learn the skills needed to perform the next episode in the story

14. Issues and Trends in Career Assessment • Technology and Internet-Based Career Assessments • Gender and Career Assessment • Ethnic and Cultural Differences in Career Assessment

15. Technology and Internet-Based Career Assessments • The Internet is not regulated • For many Internet users it can be difficult to ascertain whether the instrument is sound and methodologically strong • Misinformation (e.g., interpretation) has the potential to harm individuals • There are also concerns about privacy and keeping results confidential • Some sites do this better than others

16. Gender and Career Assessment • Interest inventories • Same-sex norms vs. combined norms • Use of less-structured assessment methods • Examination of barriers

17. Ethnic and Cultural Differences in Career Assessment • Cultural validity vs. cultural specificity • Interest inventories • Culturally appropriate model of career assessment

18. A Culturally Appropriate Model of Career Assessment (Flores, Spanerman, & Obasi, 2003) • Culturally encompassing information gathering • Culturally appropriate selection of instruments • Culturally appropriate administration • Culturally appropriate interpretation of assessment data