Advantages and Disadvantages of the Different Inventoried Approaches to Assessing Career Interests

Athanasou, James A., Australian Journal of Career Development

This Careers Forum reflects on the history of interest assessment in Australia in the last 45 years. In it I would like to review some aspects of the history of interest assessment in Australia from my personal perspective as a user and researcher. Probably my first exposure to interest measurement was when I participated in a vocational guidance interview around 1964. I cannot recall what interest assessment was used at that time. This was the era of 'test and tell' and it was conducted by a government agency, the Vocational Guidance Bureau. I had a short 40-minute preliminary interview, undertook a half-day battery of aptitude and other tests that were scored, and this was followed up by a summary interview and a report. At that time my major preferences were reported officially as:

   Your own choice of a degree in Arts, leading to
   secondary teaching, a position as a psychologist, or
   social work, is recommended.

A position as an executive trainee with a large commercial organisation would also be suitable and could follow a degree in Arts or in Economics or Commerce. (Department of Labour and Industry New South Wales, Division of Vocational Guidance Services, copy, 3 January 1968) Basically I took heed of their professional advice and, with hindsight, I must say it has not been too bad at all.

By the time I joined the research section of the Vocational Services Branch in 1976, the main methods of interest assessment were based on interview questions about subject preferences (most and least liked subject), hobbies or interests and the use of an interest questionnaire such as the locally developed in-house Vocational Interest Analysis of Warren Whyte for students up to Year 10 or the Kuder Preference Record for older students (all references, available from the author on request). This was part of a large-scale testing program and I hasten to add that at one time this service was available freely to every Year 9 student throughout New South Wales.

From memory the only other career interest inventory that was in wide use throughout Australia was the Rothwell--Miller Interest Blank and my enquiries to the Australian Council for Educational Research indicated that some 26 000 copies were sold each year. Other questionnaires were gaining prominence; amongst these, the most worthy of mention was the Vocational Preference Inventory to be followed quickly by its successor, the Self-directed Search. The latter became popular through the support of academic occupational psychologists and researchers in Australia because they were linked directly to a theory. Some commercially available pictorial card sorts and home-made occupational card sorts based on the Tyler Vocational Card Sort were starting to appear and to make inroads in the mid-1970s but they were not adopted for mainstream use. There were some experimental measures such as the now defunct but highly imaginative Brook Reaction Test of Interest and Temperament that was based on word associations. One reason for its demise was that the author died in a plane crash in Spain.

Some 34 years later I ventured again into the domain of interest assessment and completed the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey amongst a range of other questionnaires for the Society for Vocational Psychology meeting at Lehigh University.

My vocational interest estimates in percentiles were now: Literary, 93%; Clerical, 77%; Outdoor, 56%; Scientific, 49%; Musical, 33%; Computational, 29%; Social service, 28%; Artistic, 23%; Persuasive, 13%; Mechanical, 1%. The following occupational groups were said to have interests similar to me: Librarian, 0.51; Minister (of religion), 0.50; Bookstore manager, 0.47; Statistician, 0.46; and Mathematician, 0.45. I thought it was too late to take their advice; so I kept my day job as a university lecturer.

Undeterred I soldiered on and when teaching a course 'Work and People' around 2000, I arranged for my class to undertake the Kuder Career Search[TM] now part of the Internet-based Kuder Career Planning System (KCPS). I tagged along and here were my new interests: 83%, Music; 83%, Communication; 71%, Science/Technical; 67%, Mechanical; 50%, Sales/ Management; 49%, Nature; 41%, Human Services; 35%, Art; 9%, Computations; 5%, Office Detail. In considering these results the accompanying literature advised:

   THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION IS THE
   RANK ORDER OF THE SCALES, NOT THE
   EXACT SCORES. You should think of your results
   in terms of, 'I most prefer (highest ranked scale),
   next most on (second ranked scale)', and so on, to 'I
   least prefer (lowest ranked scale) activities'. (Original
   upper-case)

Probably I should have listened to my mother and just become a lawyer. By now the reader might be justifiably confused about the real interests of the author or even his sanity let alone the relevance of this information to the topic but there is more.

To round off this personalised time series analysis of interest assessment I undertook the freely available Career Interest Test Version 4.1 located on the myfuture website (http://www.myfuture.edu.au) to see what sort of recommendations I would be likely to make for myself. The results from my output are summarised in Table 1.

In making sense of these findings it may be helpful if I consolidated these results over time in terms of rankings. This has been done in Table 2. For the sake of consistency I have used the seven interest categories of the Career Interest Test as a common benchmark. The changes in rankings are not coherent and there is no consistency in the findings. More than anything else this prompted the evaluation of inventoried interests that led to this paper. What does all this have to say about the advantages and disadvantages of interest assessment? Does it mean that a …

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Publication information: Article title: Advantages and Disadvantages of the Different Inventoried Approaches to Assessing Career Interests. Contributors: Athanasou, James A. - Author. Journal title: Australian Journal of Career Development. Volume: 20. Issue: 1 Publication date: Autumn 2011. Page number: 53+. © 2008 Australian Council for Educational Research. COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale Group.

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