In the previous blog post, we listed the chapter headings in
Bernard Haldane’s book, Career
Satisfaction and Success: A Guide to Job and Personal Freedom. The very first chapter begins with these
words: “Know Your Strengths – The Way to Job Success.”
Haldane was a pioneer of the ‘strengths philosophy’ of
career development, an inside-out approach which focused first, not on the
contents of existing job descriptions posted by employers, but on identifying the career-seeker’s “strengths,”
that is, each person’s special talents
for excellence.
Haldane’s approach required the individual career-seeker: 1)
to recall their best achievements and, as part of that process, 2) to identify
what they enjoyed doing, and 3) to
ascertain what they did well.
Haldane’s original process involved storytelling and was
very labor intensive on the part of those assisting the career-seeker. By way of a solution, Haldane suggested that
the career-seeker enlist a group of friends to listen to a recitation of past
accomplishments and to record the skills against a checklist that Haldane had
prepared. Fortunately, a much better
solution then became available.
Edward
K. Strong Jr. (1884-1963)
Dr. Strong, the inventor of the
Strong Interest Inventory (SII), was a Ph.D. psychologist and longtime faculty
member at Stanford University. He was
the first to publish a systematic inventory to help people find suitable jobs. He
was also the first to use statistical methods to summarize responses to pools
of items representing various activities and occupations. The results of his work enabled a person to
envision a compelling future career, based on a fusion of that person’s
interests and personality.
That a valid and reliable link
existed between a person’s interests and personality on the one hand, and an
ideal career path on the other, was very much in doubt, even for Dr. Strong himself,
and even as he was widely being credited by his peers for having actually established
that very link. In his own words:
"No
one believed you could build scales to measure interests, or that such scales
would yield any kind of stable scores. As
a matter of fact, I didn't really believe it myself until I had been working on
my test for several years. Each time we
got a new occupational group tested, I fully expected to discover that we
couldn't differentiate it on an interest basis, and that the whole concept of
interest measurement would fall apart. What
really convinced me emotionally that we had something was a personal experience.
My son had been an indifferent student
in college and had no idea what he wanted to do vocationally. He took my test
and came out with an A on Physician, an occupation he had never considered
entering. Well, he went to medical school, got straight A's throughout, and has
been a dedicated and successful physician ever since. I began to think maybe we had a method that
would really help young people find where they belonged."
Despite
Dr. Strong’s modesty about his amazing discovery, history has shown that the
Strong Interest Inventory, which has been modified and improved by other
psychologists over the years, is regarded by many as the gold standard in
career development.
The
Strong Interest Inventory operates first by looking at the SII interest
patterns of successful people in different professions who claim to love their
work and then, matching those patterns, by profession, against the interest
patterns of career-seekers who have also taken the Strong Interest Inventory.
In
this way, career seekers can see where their pattern of interests—reflecting
their personalities—suggests they would best fit in terms of a career
choice. Note that the Strong Interest
Inventory does not measure a person’s aptitude for the various
professions, only whether their interests match those of successful and happy
practitioners in that particular profession.
As
mentioned in the previous blog post, I was a satisfied client of
Bernard Haldane Associates, Job Counselors, at its Philadelphia office in
1971. And at that time, my Haldane
counselor took me through many of the exercises later described in Haldane’s
book, Career Satisfaction and Success. In particular, I was asked to develop a list
of everything I could remember in my life that I considered an achievement at
the time. I was also taught how to write
a “functional” resume. They videotaped
me in a mock interview situation, and then critiqued it to improve my interview
skills. They taught me how to arrange
for “information interviews,” and how to negotiate a starting salary. Finally, my Haldane counselor had me take the
Strong Interest Inventory when it was still administered by paper and pencil. And the results of that experience changed my
life in ways I never could have imagined.
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