Monday, July 8, 2013

The Strong Interest Inventory


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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