Career Appraisal

The increasing specialization of today's more diverse and technologically advanced labor market challenges employees and job seekers alike to continually evaluate their career choices and engage in career appraisal. [Page 70]The development of a comprehensive career plan is essential in understanding one's interests, attributes, abilities, and values necessary to fit into this ever-changing vocational environment. Moreover, adults find themselves reconsidering previous career choices as they develop new interests or as the job market shifts. Of all these domains, vocational interests serve as the cornerstone of any career plan. John Holland's theory provides an avenue for classifying vocational interests into six categories (RIASEC): Realistic (working outdoors, building, repairing); Investigative (researching, analyzing, inquiring); Artistic (creating or enjoying art, drama, music, writing); Social (helping, instructing), Enterprising (persuading, selling, managing); and Conventional (accounting, organizing, processing data). Interest inventories such as the Strong Interest Inventory (SII) and the Campbell Interests and Skills Survey (CISS) can help users learn which combination of the RIASEC categories describes their vocational interests. Choosing work environments that align with areas of interest is more likely to increase job satisfaction.

In the last decade, researchers have established that career appraisal for the individual is more useful when it goes beyond the six general categories of interests to specific interests. For example, although it is useful to know someone has Realistic interests, knowing concretely whether he or she enjoys military activities or mechanical activities allows for better discrimination. In addition, increased specificity translates to increased ability to determine career fields and educational majors that more closely align with one's interests as well as those that prove to be less desirable. The SII and CISS mentioned above provide measures of specific vocational interests as well as general interests. Although occupational scales on the SII or the CIS implicitly provide greater specificity, scales such as the Basic Interest Scales on the SII make the process explicit and directly interpretable based on the transparency of those scales.

Traditionally, vocational interest assessment has been the primary tool used to assist clients in making important career choices. However, two additional constructs that have emerged in the past decade are also important contributors. The construct of personality has been shown to be an important variable in helping us understand the unique individual from a more holistic outlook. To date, three empirical reviews have examined the overlap of personality and interests. This evidence shows that both have at least three clear general links: (1) People who are more open to new experiences tend to have more artistic and investigative interests, (2) extraverts tend to have more social and enterprising interests, and (3) people who are more agreeable tend to have more social interests. Vocational counselors who incorporate this knowledge will be in a better position to view their clients more broadly than simply through their vocational interests. For example, clients who are more open to novel and new experiences may be more satisfied with intellectual or creative work environments. Interestingly, personality and interests may be genetically linked; studies show that about 50 percent of their stable variance is genetic.

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