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