Career Planning Assessments
When you lay out the cards for the True Colors personality assessment, it's hard not to think of Tarot sets or astrological signs. The cards are bright and symbolic with titles such as Green, Gold, Blue, and Orange. You shuffle them, you study them, you arrange them before you in a pattern meaningful to yourself. Eventually you come up with a designation: you are Green/Orange, for instance, or Blue/Gold or Gold/Green. Clients have drawn parallels between personality assessments and astrology, saying it's much like being assigned the title Pisces or Taurus; and sometimes you can hear in the tone of voice their skepticism and disrespect.
Another criticism I've encountered about assessments related to career planning is that you can manipulate the results. If a client is already set on a particular occupational choice, the objection is that she can answer assessment questions in a way that encourages that occupation to come up in her results (thereby offering confirmation that might be artificial). How valid are these criticisms?
Well, consider this. Say your goal is to be a dental assistant. If you're asked (as you are on the Strong Interest Inventory, which assesses your interests and compares them to the interests of people who enjoy their own occupations) whether you'd rather be an airline pilot or an airline ticket agent, how would you answer to tip the result towards dental assistant? Obviously if you're asked (and you are) if you'd like to do the work of a dentist, you could say yes on the assumption that it bears a relation to your targeted goal. But if you're asked about doing the work of an art teacher? A clothes designer? A landscape gardener? What about identifying how you feel about leisure activities such as golf, jazz or rock concerts, boxing? Maybe saying you like these occupations or activities will slant you towards dental assistant; or maybe saying you dislike them will. Who can tell? Every answer you give will affect the eventual results, and for some of those answers you just can't predict which direction they'll take you.
As for the observation concerning personality assessments and astrology, I'd suggest the two are not alike at all, but are actually opposite in their approaches. Astrology looks first to a person's birth date, and on the basis of that impersonal information assigns you to a category and endows you with certain characteristics. Personality assessments, on the other hand, look first to you. They ask you what you think are your most distinctive qualities, preferences, and behaviours; and on the basis of that highly personal self-awareness, you are assigned to a category. That category is not arbitrary-it's a form of shorthand to sum up the characteristics you have already identified about yourself.
Career planning assessments are not perfect. But neither are they mystical instruments that decide for you what your nature is and bestow an occupation upon you; nor are they devices so wobbly that they can't be trusted to provide useful information. The light they cast isn't dim enough to tell fortunes by or commit sleight-of-hand. Instead they are a spotlight, illuminating facts and dreams and skills that were present all along, but that you didn't really notice until they were grouped together as central players.
Gillian Derksen, BA, is an Employment Assistant with SCCI Project Restart Ltd, a free 17-day career planning program in Surrey.
Published in The Recruit September 15, 2006.