Moto and Objectives


Monday, 18 February 2013

Career Counseling


Career counseling, career guidance and career coaching are similar in nature to other types of counseling or coaching, e.g. marriage or psychological counseling. What unites all types of professional counseling is the role of practitioners, who combine giving advice on their topic of expertise with counseling techniques that support clients in making complex decisions and facing difficult situations. The focus of career counseling is generally on issues such as career exploration, career change, personal career development and other career related issues.

Career Counseling

 Benefits of Career Counseling
Professional career counselors can support people with career-related challenges in many ways.Through their expertise in career development and labor markets, they can put a person's qualification, experience, strengths and weakness in a broad perspective taking into consideration their desired salary, personal hobbies and interests, location, job market and educational possibilites. Through their counselling and teaching abilities, career counselors can additionally support people in gaining a better understanding of what really matters for them personally, how they can plan their careers autonomously, or help them in making tough decisions and getting through times of crisis. Finally, career counselors are often capable of supporting their clients in finding suitable placements/ jobs, in working out conflicts with their employers, or finding the support of other helpful services.It is due to these various benefits of career counseling that policy-makers in many countries of the world publicly fund guidance services. For example, the European Union understands career guidance and counseling as an instrument to effectively combat social exclusion and increase citizens' employability.

 Career Assessment Process :

Strong Interest Inventory

The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) is an interest inventory used in career assessment. The goal of this assessment is to give insight into a person's interests, so that they may have less difficulty in deciding on an appropriate career choice for themselves. It is also frequently used for educational guidance as one of the most popular career assessment tools. The test was developed in 1927 by psychologist E.K. Strong, Jr. to help people exiting the military find suitable jobs. It was revised later by Jo-Ida Hansen, and David Campbell. The modern version (2004) is based on the typology (Holland Codes) of psychologist John L. Holland. The Strong is designed for high school students, college students, and adults and was found to be at about the ninth-grade reading level (Blackwell and Case, 2008, p. 122). Unfortunately the newly revised Strong is available only in English, unlike the previous version.

Contents
Area
Number of Questions in Each Area
Occupations
107
Subject Areas
46
Activities
85
Leisure Activities
28
People
16
Your Characteristics
9

  1. Scores on the level of interest on each of the six Holland Codes or General Occupational Themes.
  1. Scores on 30 Basic Interest Scales (e.g. art, science, and public speaking)
  1. Scores on 244 Occupational Scales which indicate the similarity between the respondent's interests and those of people working in each of the 122 occupations.
  1. Scores on 5 Personal Style Scales (learning, working, leadership, risk-taking and team orientation).
  1. Scores on 3 Administrative Scales used to identify test errors or unusual profiles.

Holland Codes

Contents


Sample professions

Doers (Realistic)


Thinkers (Investigative)


Creators (Artistic)


Helpers (Social)


Persuaders (Enterprising)


Organizers (Conventional)


History

Before he created the Inventory, Strong was the head of the Bureau of Educational Research at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Strong attended a seminar at the Carnegie Institute of Technology where a man by the name of Clarence S. Yoakum introduced the use of questionnaires in differentiating between people of various occupations. This later sparked Strong's interest in developing a better way of measuring people's occupational interests. (Donnay, 1997). Starting off as the "Strong Vocational Interest Blank", the name changed when the test was revised in 1974 to the Stong-Campbell Interest Inventory. Today we call it the Strong Interest Inventory. The Inventory has been revised 6 times over the years to reflect continued development in the field. Strong based his empirical approach on the idea that interests were on a dimension of liking to disliking that could be used to discriminate among various occupational groups. (Donnay, 1997, p.3) In other words, Strong developed several scales that contrasted groups of people, based on their answers. This method of scaling, developed by Strong, has been very influential and has been used in several different questionnaires, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Strong's original Inventory had 10 occupational scales. The original Inventory was created with men in mind, so in 1933 Strong came out with a women's form of the Strong Vocational Blank. In 1974 when the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory came out, Campbell had combined both the men's and the women's forms into a single form. Other improvements that Campbell made to earlier versions include: the use of 124 occupational scales, the continued use of 23 Basic Interest Scales, and the addition of 2 special scales to measure academic comfort and introversion/extroversion dimensions. The Strong Interest Inventory is high in both predictive and concurrent validity (Donnay, 1997).

Components

The newly revised inventory consists of 291 items that measure an individual's interest in six areas:
The first 282 items are answered by the examinee choosing one of the following options: "strongly like", "like", "indifferent", "dislike", or "strongly dislike" while the remaining 9 items in the "Your Characteristics" section are answered the same way but with different options including: "strongly like me", "like me", "don’t know", "unlike me", or "strongly unlike me".It is an assessment of interests, and not to be confused with personality assessments or aptitude test.

Scoring

The newly revised version of this test can typically be taken in 30-45 minutes after which the results must be scored by computer. After scoring, an individual can then view how their personal interests compare with the interests of people in a specific career field. Access to the comparison database and interpretation of the results usually incurs a fee.
Strong Interest Inventory is a registered trademark of CPP, Inc. of Mountain View, California.
The results include:

Criticism

Evolution of Jobs Many of the jobs that the Strong Interest Inventory predict, did not exist prior to the latest version. Because of this fact, the test is constantly being updated as new jobs are created and technology advances. Jan Case from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and Terry L Blackwell from Montana State University-Billings did a study in 2008 and concluded, "The Strong Interest Inventory's qualitative features (including the design of the test booklets, quality and clarity of its contents, durability, appropriateness for the test-takers, and supportive interpretation materials) and its psychometric characteristics continue to distinguish this instrument as a standard of excellence...the Strong continues to set the standard for vocational interest inventories. It has proven reliability and validity properties. Furthermore, the developers have continued to strive for improvements and innovations in this inventory. Career counselors, psychologists, and others using the Strong will find they have an instrument that is methodologically sophisticated and that will provide clients with much information to ponder along with the resources with which make reasoned career decisions." 

 The Holland Codes or the Holland Occupational Themes (RIASEC), developed by the late psychologist John L. Holland, refers to a theory of careers and vocational choice based upon personality types. Each letter or code stands for a particular "type": Realistic (Doers), Investigative (Thinkers), Artistic (Creators), Social (Helpers), Enterprising (Persuaders), and Conventional (Organizers)."
According to the Committee on Scientific Awards, Holland's "research shows that personalities seek out and flourish in career environments they fit and that jobs and career environments are classifiable by the personalities that flourish in them." Holland also wrote of his theory that "the choice of a vocation is an expression of personality." Furthermore, while Holland suggests that people can be "categorized as one of six types, " he also argues that "a six-category scheme built on the assumption that there are only six kinds of people in the world is unacceptable on the strength of common sense alone. But a six category scheme that allows a simple ordering of a person's resemblance to each of the six models provides the possibility of 720 different personality patterns."
The US Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA) has been using the RIASEC model in the "Interests" section of its free online database, The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) since its inception during the late 1990s.

The Holland RIASEC hexagon

The following professions, listed by one type, may be associated with other types as well.
"Independent, stable, persistent, genuine, practical, and thrifty tasks that are tactile, physical, athletic, or mechanical [...] being outdoors, using tools, operating machines, interacting with animals, and working with their hands."

 Artistic (with a Realistic combination)

"Intellectual, introspective, and inquisitive. They are curious, methodical, rational, analytical, and logical [...] scholarly, scientific, technical, or medical [...] avid readers. They like to solve problems, perform experiments, and conduct research."
"Creative, intuitive, sensitive, articulate, and expressive. They are unstructured, original, nonconforming, and innovative. They rely on feelings, imagination, and inspiration. They like to work with ideas, abstractions, and concepts. They are spontaneous and open-minded."
"Kind, generous, cooperative, patient, caring, helpful, empathetic, tactful, and friendly. They excel at socializing, helping others, and teaching. They like tasks that involve teamwork, social interaction,relationship building, and improvement of society."

 Artistic (with a Social combination)

"Adventurous, ambitious, assertive, extroverted, energetic, enthusiastic, confident, and optimistic. They are dominant, persuasive, and motivational.They like influencing others, being in charge, taking risks, debating, and competing."

Artistic (with an Enterprising combination)

"Conscientious and conservative. They are logical, efficient, orderly, and organized. They are thorough and detail-oriented. They value precision and accuracy. They are reliable. They enjoy practical tasks, quantitative measurements, and structured environments. They follow the rules."

Artistic (with a Conventional combination)


Credit: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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