Counselor Quick Reference

Career-assessment types, the Strong Interest Inventory and RIASEC model, the O*NET Interest Profiler, vocational/situational evaluation, and career assessment for youth with disabilities and veterans — from Textbook Ch. 9. No matching lecture module exists yet, so this is textbook-only.

Ch. 9 — Career & Occupational Assessments pp. 195–212

Career and Occupational Assessments and Interest Inventories

SII & RIASEC · O*NET IP · vocational/situational evaluation · youth-with-disabilities transition · veteran career assessment

Glossary

Interest inventory: Measures preferences for activities/environments to match a person to job roles or industries (e.g., the Strong Interest Inventory).
Aptitude test: Predicts how quickly someone could learn the skills needed for a school program, training, or occupation — forward-looking, not what's already known.
Values assessment: Measures personal values/priorities and how they intersect with career choice — job satisfaction, work-life balance, financial security.
RIASEC: Holland's six-type model of vocational personality — Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional — underlying both the SII and the O*NET Interest Profiler.
Vocational Evaluation (VE): A systematic process combining psychometric tests, structured interviews, and work samples to assess current work abilities, skills, and limitations.
Situational Evaluation (SE): Assesses vocational potential by observing a person perform real or simulated work tasks — captures things standard testing can miss, at the cost of more subjectivity and resources.
Transferable Skills Analysis (TSA): A vocational-rehabilitation procedure translating a person's (often military) work history into terms relevant to civilian jobs — used in job search and earnings-loss determination.
Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI): A 48-item self-administered inventory identifying and challenging negative career thoughts across three scales.
Self-Directed Search (SDS): A Holland/RIASEC-based instrument that is fully self-administered, self-scored, and self-interpreted (~20 minutes).

Frameworks & models

4 main types of career assessment

Interest inventories — e.g., SII
Aptitude tests — likely learning speed for a role
Personality assessments — e.g., Big Five Inventory
Values assessments — e.g., Work Values Inventory

Holland's RIASEC types

Realistic — hands-on, practical (engineering, athletics)
Investigative — analytical, scientific (research, medicine)
Artistic — creative, expressive (art, design, performing)
Social — people-oriented (counseling, teaching, healthcare)
Enterprising — persuasive, leadership-driven (sales, business)
Conventional — organized, structured (accounting, admin, coding)

Hexagon relationships: Adjacent (next to) · Alternate (one apart) · Opposite (directly across).

SII — 4 scale categories

General Occupational Themes (GOTs) — the 6 RIASEC types
Basic Interest Scales (BISs) — specific interest fields
Occupational Scales (OSs) — compares you to people already in the role (scale count varies by revision; the 2004 form had 244 scales across 122 occupations)
Personal Style Scales (PSSs) — work-life/leadership/team tendencies

291 items · 35–40 min · 5-point Likert · age 15+ · six revisions since 1927.

Personal Style Scales — 5 scales

Learning Environment — academic vs. practical/vocational
Work Style — people-facing vs. solitary work
Risk-Taking — high scorers: firefighter, CEO; low: accountant, librarian
Leadership Style — assertive/social vs. independent/technical
Team Orientation — collaborative vs. independent-task roles

O*NET Interest Profiler

Current forms: paper Short Form (60 items) and web Mini-IP (30 items); the original 180-item Long Form is legacy
Web version (Mini-IP) delivered via My Next Move (mynextmove.org); Spanish version at Mi Próximo Paso
Links to O*NET OnLine's 900+ catalogued occupations
RIASEC-based, like the SII

Youth-with-disabilities transition law

IDEA (2004) — mandates coordinated transition activities (postsecondary ed, vocational ed, employment, independent living, community participation)
Rehabilitation Act of 1973 / WIOA Title IV — workforce-focused transition regulations
Legal right to transition services ends at high school graduation or the state's IDEA age cap (commonly 21–22; varies by state)

Veteran-specific career tools

CTI — 48 items, 7–15 min; 3 scales (Decision-Making Confusion, Commitment Anxiety, External Conflict)
SDS — Holland-based, fully self-administered
VMOF — adjunct to SDS; translates military jobs into Holland codes
TSA — translates military work history into civilian-workforce terms

Clinical checkpoints

Don't rely on interest-fit alone — the chapter reports no significant relationship between interest-fit and job satisfaction (broader meta-analytic literature finds small-to-moderate positive links), so pair interest data with aptitude, values, and personality information
Get properly acquainted/certified with the SII (or any standardized instrument) before administering — understand purpose, format, and structure first
Distinguish Vocational Evaluation (tests + interviews + work samples, assessing readiness) from Situational Evaluation (direct observation of real/simulated work tasks)
Remember the IDEA/WIOA distinction: IDEA mandates the transition-activities plan; WIOA Title IV addresses the workforce/employment side, and IDEA rights end at graduation or the state's age cap (commonly 21–22)
With veterans, expect a translation problem — civilian employers often don't recognize military skill "jargon," which is exactly what TSA and VMOF are built to bridge
Weigh cultural fit (collectivist vs. individualist orientation, language, SES) before treating any career assessment as one-size-fits-all

No lecture pairing yet. Like the Ch. 8 page, there's no class-notes module for this chapter yet — everything here is textbook-only. If a matching lecture module shows up later, this page should get a matching update the way the M4 page did for Ch. 4.

This sheet is for fast recall, not citations. It deliberately drops citation years and reliability figures — several were flagged during extraction as partially illegible or angle-blurred in the source photos. Check the textbook chapter directly before quoting any specific statistic, date, or reliability coefficient in graded work.