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Career Consulting

At the most general level, career counseling involves learning about oneself and the world of work. Typically, learning about oneself in this context means obtaining information about one's interests, needs, and abilities. Interest inventory assessments such as the Strong Interest Inventory offer several advantages over other methods of data gathering, it is incorporated into all major approaches to career counseling as an integral component of the client's self-exploration. By far the most common use of the Strong is to help people make educational and occupational choices. People must make decisions about the course of their lives. Because choices about educational major and eventual occupation may have more impact on peoples' lives than any other decisions they make, these choices should be well-informed.

Paladin Associates have years of success using the Strong and applying it to individual needs. We urge anyone making career or educational decisions to take the assessment.

The Strong Interest Inventory® Indicator

The Strong Interest Inventory® assessment will provide individuals with information about themselves and their relationship to the working world; information that will lead to greater self-understanding and to better decisions about the course of their lives. It also provides people, who must make decisions about others (e.g., counselors, teachers, administrators and supervisors), with information and strategies so that decisions these people make are ones that consider the unique qualities on each individual.

The Strong Interest Inventory® indicator was introduced in 1927 by E.K. Strong, a researcher at Stanford University. Since that time the Strong Interest Inventory® assessment has been revised and improved, including the addition of Holland's RIASEC theory, which added general occupational themes to improve the quality of the instrument. Because the instrument is constantly updated, the scores received by an individual today compare that person's interests with those of people who have responded to the inventory recently and who may be in occupations that did not exist in Dr. Strong's day.

The Strong Interest Inventory® indicator is a carefully constructed questionnaire that inquires about a respondent's level of interest in a wide range of familiar items (i.e. words or short phrases describing occupations, occupational activities, hobbies, leisure activities, school subjects, and types of people). For each of the 317 items, the respondent is ask to indicate his or her preferences among three response categories on an answer sheet. The answers are then analyzed by computer to derive scores on measures of interest type, called scales. The results are then printed on a report called a profile, which presents the scale scores in an organized format and offers interpretive information.

The Strong Interest Inventory® assessment gives the respondent five main types of information:

1. Scores on six General Occupational Themes, which reflect the respondent's overall orientation to work.
2. Scores on 25 Basic Interest Scales, which report consistency of interests or aversions in 25 specific areas.
3. Scores on 211 Occupational Scales representing 109 different occupations, which indicate degree of similarity between the respondent's interests and the characteristic interests of men and women working in those occupations.
4. Scores on four Personal; Style Scales, which measure aspects of the style with which the respondent likes to learn, work, assume leadership, and take risks.
5. Three types of Administrative Indexes, which help to identify invalid or unusual profiles for special attention.

The power of the assessment thus rests on two assumptions:

1. That the day-to-day activities typical of a specific occupation are reflected in the interests of the people who are employed in it.
2. That those who have similar patterns of interests will be satisfied in that occupation if they have compatible values and the necessary knowledge and abilities.

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