Week 10: Assessment of Career and Employment
Career assessment is an interesting field with a long and glorious past. Although career assessments are valid and useful, there are many factors that should be considered – no one assessment should be the base of a substantial life decision. Career counseling considers many areas such as maturity, socioeconomic class, and educational level of the client – all-important areas of career consideration. As well, family, societal, and peer expectations influence individual behavior, and the individual’s personality or temperament also are influential on job choice and job satisfaction.
The chapter also briefly covers federal, state, and professional tests that are used as prerequisites for hiring. These assessments allow for an objective evaluation of individual competencies, and an analysis of research shows that objective testing is non-discriminatory for use in objective selection processes. Last, this chapter reviews an important section that reviews the nine specific standards for the use of tests in employment contexts.
This is an area of counseling that inevitably becomes a part of our clients finding satisfied and meaningful lives and is an area that we should know how to use well. As you work through this information, remember that there is a course in your program that specifically covers Career Counseling, and so this chapter is one that is abbreviated. You will receive a great deal more information in the Career Counseling course if you have not taken it yet.
Session Objectives
By the end of this week you will:
- Describe career assessment
- Explain the use of the initial interview in career assessment
- Explain the use of interest inventories in career assessment and describe several key inventories, including the SDS, the SII, and the CISS
- Describe work values, and explain how work values influence the process of career decision making
- Describe the use of personality inventories such as the Kuder, the COPS, and DISCOVER
- Describe the various instruemtns and strategies used in employment assessment
- Describe the issue of feedback sessions in orally communicating assessment results
- Describe the potential problems and issues associated with feedback sessions
