Missing Piece in College Retention Improvement Efforts

Significantly improving college retention is only possible when state and national policymakers consider increasing the number of students who choose a college major that fits their personality. Unfortunately, states and the federal government are making this personality-major match more difficult to achieve. Learn more by visiting our new "College Retention, Completion, and Graduation" article at The Career Key website.

UPDATE: our PRWEB college completion press release went out today (March 9, 2011).

Click here to download the new PDF report, "Key Piece in College Completion Missing: Personality Major Match," by Career Key author, Lawrence K. Jones, Ph.D., NCC.

For a long time, Dr. Jones has been active in the professional career development community, advocating for the use of scientifically valid assessments in career guidance. To download reprints of his articles on this issue published by the National Career Development Association and the American School Counselor Association, please visit our Press Room and click on the "Articles" section.

Career Clusters Interest Survey Validity Questioned in Recent Study

The Career Clusters Interest Survey (CCIS) is a scientifically invalid measure for measuring your students' or clients' interests for choosing a Career Cluster or Career Pathway, according to Dominic R. Prime and Terence Tracey's article "Psychometric Properties of the Career Clusters Interest Survey" in the May 2010 Journal of Career Assessment (JCA). It's available through your public or local university library.

The first study ever done of the CCIS, offered by the States' Career Clusters Initiative, shows that the CCIS has serious flaws. For example, it does not measure 3 of the 6 Holland personality types, specifically the Conventional, Realistic, and Investigative personality types.

According to the JCA article, "[u]sing the CCIS to guide students could result in a very restricted examination of occupations." 

If you'd like to use an affordable, scientifically valid measure of Holland's 6 personality types to match students' interests with career clusters and career pathways, please visit our "Choosing a Career Cluster, Field or Pathway" article at The Career Key website. You can download a map that shows how the clusters and pathways are related to interests, the Holland personality types, and occupations.

The Journal of Career Assessment article mentions other scientifically valid measures as alternatives to the Career Clusters Interest Survey if you want to explore more.

Well-Organized Career Options: What’s On Your List?

If you are choosing a career, have you ever considered how all your career options are organized? I bet you haven’t – but why not? Being “well organized” isn't just for Martha Stewart wanna-bes or accountants, is it?

Being well-organized is cool. The Container Store has made it acceptable to pay $50 for a plastic storage container made in China that you could have purchased at Target for $10.99. The Container Store version is just more beautiful. Also think IKEA. Love those brightly colored containers.

And you know how financial gurus say treat your physical money with the respect it deserves? (not stuffed loose in your pocket for example).

Being organized means you have your life put together – something to be admired and an efficient way to access your stuff. Smart organization can also help you make a big life decision like choosing or changing a career.

You might want to consider how your buffet of career choices is organized. How else can you be sure that when you choose your career, you’re looking at your options in an efficient, comprehensive way?

The Unhelpful Alphabetical Career Laundry List
How many of you have received an alphabetical laundry list of “matching” careers from a valid or invalid career test? “You should be an: actor, architect, art therapist, author…..” Everybody has.

The Smart, Organized Alternative for Matching Careers
If you want to see a science-based way to organize career choices, visit Career Key’s article “Match Your Personality with Careers.” For each Holland personality type, you can see a list of occupations organized into work groups – related careers with similar worker traits, skills, and abilities. If you’re from Canada, go to the Career Key Canada’s article. Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, The Career Key’s author and a vocational expert, organized this system – not a marketing copy writer.

Go to any other website offering a career test to the public, free or otherwise, and you will not find career options so well organized in a practical and useful way.

You have to be a special person/geek to love classification systems for careers – also referred to as “taxonomies.” Recently I’ve met a few like minded professionals who care about them as much as I do. I appreciate them also because my family is largely made up of geeks, linear thinkers, and engineers.

So I dedicate this post to my fellow taxonomy enthusiasts and career development practitioners who see the value in a well-organized and high quality approach to choosing a career. I think users appreciate it too.

Using the Career Personality Test To Jumpstart Your Career Planning

A valid career personality test is just one tool for making a career choice but one of the most important. By giving you a concrete, science based way to jumpstart your career planning, you will be more likely to take action and make a decision you won’t regret.

Three of the biggest challenges in choosing or changing a career are:

• Getting started – what to do first?
• Narrowing your career choices to a “short list” of options.
• Making and following through on your decision.
  

Taking several valid career tests can help you overcome these challenges by giving you a:

• concrete first step to immediately take,
• proven, accurate way to narrow your options, and
• confidence builder by knowing your decision is based on proven science, making it more likely that you’ll follow through on your decision.
  

Holland’s Theory of Career Choice, on which our career tests are based, is the most popular, most researched and well-established career theory in the world. Helping you locate yourself in the world of work is its greatest benefit. The Career Key test is a scientifically valid measure of the 6 Holland personality types.

If you’re still having trouble focusing or getting started on your career plan, I recently found this excellent online resource with great tips on how to concentrate. When you get to summarizing your objectives and setting a “general strategy of accomplishment,” look to our most popular page, “Getting Started,” to show you the way.

I also recommend visiting my previous posts: 5 tips for choosing the best career test and Career Test Results. Our 3 websites, The Career Key, The Career Key Canada, and The Self-Employment Key, offer one of the few scientifically valid career tests on the Internet.

As always, I enjoy hearing from you. How have you successfully used valid career tests to get started and focus your efforts?

5 Tips for Choosing a Career Test

Choosing the right career test is part of making a good career decision. A valid career test helps you learn accurate information about yourself so that when you look at your job options and make a decision, you act on the best information. A high-quality decision made this way likely leads to job satisfaction.

The following tips will help job seekers choose the right career test:

• Consider taking a high quality career interest inventory. The best valid interest inventory will do four things: help you understand yourself better, match you with careers that are likely to lead to satisfaction and success, suggest careers you had not thought of, and give you comprehensive information about each one. Through this process, you learn about yourself, the pros and cons of each job option, which helps you make a successful career decision.

• For a serious career decision, choose a serious, valid test. Quizzes, games, sorters, profilers, and finders that assess and match you with jobs are all career tests. To be helpful, they must be valid measures. But few of them are. For a test to be “valid,” there must be published, scientific evidence that it measures, in fact, what the author claims it measures. If you want accurate information about yourself and job options that fit you, take a valid test.

• Make sure the test website contains information about the test's validity. It should mention specific studies or offer a professional manual you can see. A manual will describe validity studies; for an example, click here. If no such information is available, avoid using it.

• Look beyond credentials, links, and endorsements. A Ph.D.'s endorsement or authorship does not make a test valid; anyone, with or without a Ph.D., can create an invalid career test. Links from schools, government and professional organizations are well-intentioned, but often unreliable.
  

• Seek the help of a professionally trained career counselor who recognizes the importance of test validity. They can help you choose the right test and help you interpret your results. The National Career Development Association provides helpful consumer guidelines on selecting a counselor and CounselorFind of the National Board of Certified Counselors can help you find a certified counselor near you.
  

No test can tell you what to do. But choosing the right test, one that gives you comprehensive, accurate information about yourself and your career options, is a step on the road to job success.

These tips also appeared in a recent post about career tests and The Career Key on MSNBC columnist Eve Tahmincioglu's CareerDiva blog; please visit her site for more helpful career information.

Harmful internet career tests attract national attention

The National Career Development Association (NCDA) has just published an article on the growing problem of harmful internet career tests in the summer 2008 issue of its national magazine, Career Developments. This summer's issue focuses on important public policy issues facing career development professionals and their clients. In the article, The Career Key's author, Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, examines the nature of this growing problem and why counselors and the people they help should be concerned.

Please contact me if you have comments or would like a copy of the article.

New Career Test Article Warns About Harmful Online Tests

The Washington Counseletter, a well-known and respected publication for education professionals since 1963, has just published an article about evaluating career tests by Dr. Lawrence K. Jones called "Testing the Test: Harming Students by Using an Invalid Career Test."

Along with useful, practical advice about how to select a valid career test, it contains a much needed and long overdue critique of the invalid Department of Labor O*Net Interest Profiler (IP). While the IP is popular with many educators because it is free and distributed by the government, implying credibility, it is not a valid measure of the Holland personality types. The little research the Department of Labor has done with the IP proves this point; more about this important issue on our website.

The article appears in the May 2008 edition of the Counseletter.

Career Test Results: What Not to Expect

When I talk or email with someone about career test results, I sometimes find that a few people expect a career test to match them with one perfect career or give them a result with perhaps 5 or fewer "best careers" for them.

No scientifically valid career test can provide such a tailored result, and any test that provides such a result is misleading. Perhaps the phrase, "if it's too good to be true, it isn't [true]" is applicable here.

The process of choosing a career is necessarily complicated and time-consuming. And it also can be frustrating and hard to narrow down one's choices. Having a buffet to choose from is not always the most satisfying, nutritional, or efficient way to feed oneself.

Scientifically valid test results, like those from The Career Key test, and the exercises on our website help you narrow down your career choices:

• Holland's Theory of Career Choice, on which The Career Key test is based, gives you a way to consider the "big picture" of choosing a career - it helps answer the question, "how do I choose a career I will enjoy?"
  
• The Career Key test measures how similar you are to Holland's six personality types so that you can narrow your choices down to those jobs that match your strongest types.
• Doing the exercises we recommend in our article Learn More About Yourself helps narrow those matching jobs even further by examining their relationships to your unique qualities.
• Once you've got your "short list" of jobs that interest you, learn more about them using these strategies and then make your choice.
  

So although no one can credibly hand you a test result with your perfect career on it, there are proven guidelines for getting there. Better to trust homework you do on yourself and your options, rather than someone telling you what you should do.

Are students evaluating the quality of Internet sources of information?

They should be. (And so should the rest of us).

Critical thinking is one of ten "Essential 'Habits of Mind'" college faculty identify as essential learning behaviors for coursework success. According to a recently released study of American Freshman by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California - Los Angeles, less than 50% of students frequently evaluate the quality or reliability of information received from the Internet.

Only 33.8% of students who frequently use the internet for research/homework or to read blogs and 44.3% of those who frequently use the web to read the news say that they frequently evaluate the reliability of information they receive.

These statistics make me wonder what the percentages are for adults. Probably not too different.

This study reminds us of how important it is for career guidance professionals to evaluate the validity of career tests on the internet before recommending them to others. If you would like to see a checklist for doing such an evaluation, see Dr. Jones's recent article "Testing the Test," published in the American School Counselor's Association (ASCA) School Counselor magazine. It is available for download in our Press Room.

Career Tests: Choosing the right career test to choose the right career

A valid career test can help you in choosing a career. Career testing can give you valuable career help. You can,

• Identify good career options,

• Learn about yourself, and

• Understand how the career you choose affects your job satisfaction and success.

We have worked hard to maximize these benefits for Career Key users. And, quite frankly, I think we are the best on the Internet.

What surprises me is the number and popularity of fake career tests online. These are career tests that "say" they measure certain traits, like your personality, but they don't. A valid test is the result of scientific research; not greed. Their graphic design and claims are often impressive, but they are a hoax. They are created to sell you something or get your personal information to sell to others. Millions use them. And, unfortunately, many people are misled and harmed.

Have you used a valid career test? Was it helpful?

Other than career tests, have you used other methods in choosing a career?

Have you tried any of the methods recommended at our website? Like, Learn More about Yourself or Learn More about the Jobs that Interest Me? How helpful were they?

Dr. Jones Publishes Article on Harmful Tests

The American School Counselor Association magazine School Counselor will publish in its November/December 2007 career development issue Dr. Jones's article, "Harming Students by Using an Invalid Career Test." It is an expansion on the article he wrote here drawing attention to the widespread use of invalid career tests. In 2003, The Journal of Career Assessment devoted several articles to the use of internet career tests and the poor quality and lack of validity of many of them; and yet people continue to use, recommend and link to these invalid tests.

Although this issue may seem self-serving for The Career Key and Dr. Jones, a test developer, to raise, anyone who knows Dr. Jones knows that much of his professional career has been devoted to measuring results in the career guidance area. Also, The Career Key was started as a philanthropy - free of charge for almost ten years until the costs of programming and web hosting made charging for the test a necessity. Now, Dr. Jones continues to provide most of the website content for free while providing heavy group purchase discounts to counselors.

I am sure and I hope there will be many more posts and discussion on this topic.