Some Reflections on Career Assessment: The Future Could Be Chaos (Careers Forum) (Essay‪)‬

Let me describe a fairly common occurrence in my work training people in the field of career assessment. After explaining the principles of vocational interest measurement, one of the conference participants will want to present a particular interest profile from one of their students or clients. Typically, the profile will be universally flat with no scores (for however many scales the inventory assesses) above the 15th percentile. With a mixture of both glee and frustration, the conference participant will then ask something like, 'Well, what can you make of that? How can this profile help the person make a better career choice?' Implicit in these questions are assumptions about the inadequacy of the data, even its uselessness for the purpose for which it was initially gathered. The data will appear useless if the only purpose of the administration of the interest inventory was to find a neat match between the interests of the person and the characteristics of either those in particular occupations or the characteristics of particular work contexts (e.g., outdoors, using technology).