Vocational
JOIN: The Guide to Career Development
Why the Jobs and Occupations Inventory Was Created for The Censeo Assessment System.
There are good reasons for a new approach to career choice and preparation. Many of the vocational interest forms used at the end of the last century were produced decades ago, and do not always reflect the choices open in the new millennium. Those who would like to start on a new career, or to study those courses best suited to their interests and aptitudes, must be able to decide with the help of questions and answers designed for work with today's technology.
In addition, most vocational choice forms in use today have three features that are barriers to their use, analysis and interpretation.
- First, they are very long; two to three hundred questions are not unusual. The effort involved can produce unsatisfactory results, because of fatigue and boredom.
- Next, they are often constructed to be forced-choice; This means that people are asked to choose between two or more jobs or activities, e.g. between music and computing. They are not allowed to say how much they would like to participate in both. people get frustrated at this, especially when they do not want to close off an avenue by rejecting one or more possible opportunities.
- Thirdly, forced-choice inventories introduce technical difficulties; In validating forced-choice items, choosing one from a number of alternatives may introduce an artificial scoring system.
Benefits of JOIN
JOIN has considerable advantages over many current occupational interest inventories because it avoids their common faults and has been standardised only during the past few years.
- JOIN is not lengthy
- JOIN has no technical validation problems
- JOIN does not ask people to reject outright any type of work activity by forced-choice
- JOIN was constructed for today's job market and standardised on more than 1.500 young people with a diverse range of interests and backgrounds
- JOIN has a computer interface that is interactive with the applicant
- JOIN has a personalised report that is tailored to the applicants responses
JOIN: A Brief Outline
The central purpose of JOIN is to present a wide range of modern work activities in the shortest possible form. Once choices are made, and these are assessed for strength of interest, a more fine-grained personal appraisal is possible. Standardisation was carried out on a large and representative sample of 1500 young people, 1000 males and 500 females. Scale reliabilities are high and the inventory was used in a major study of gender identity.
To achieve these diverse goals, 250 different activities were selected and then grouped in related clusters of three, to represent the kinds of things people do when they work at different types of jobs. By grouping them, the number of questions was reduced from over 200 to fewer than 100 but the range of occupations was preserved.
The a rating scale was designed to find out how often people had considered getting involved in these work activities.
The 15 individual scales are presented in a smaller number of four areas. Every scale has seven items. By Combining scores from those scales that are part of the same family, four broad work area scores are developed. The four work areas and their individual scales are shown below.
The Business Environment
- Business Operations and Management
- Office Services and Sales
- Computing Science and Support
- Hotels, Food and Travel Services
The Creative Arts and Media Environment
- Writing and Editing
- Media and Entertainment
- Music Performance and Production
- Visual Arts
- Beauty, Fashion and Style
The Physical Environment
- Construction and Engineering
- Protection and Military Services
- Physical Fitness
- Leisure and Sports
- Earth Science and The Natural Environment
The Nurturing and Caring Environment
- Medical and Health Sciences
- Teaching and social Services
These innovations have produced an inventory that is quick to understand, to use and complete. It is reliable and with quite remarkable predictive power.
The Personalised JOIN Report
The state-of-the-art personalised JOIN report is an aspect of the Censeo Assessment System that will be found nowhere else in the testing calendar today.
The JOIN report accurately shows the kind of work that people want to become involved in. It provides a permanent record for discussion with parents, advisors and course councilors. It should be given to all applicants as a form of encouragement to choose the right career path.
The report is the system' s automatic interactive dialogue with the applicant once the inventory items have been completed. The results are reviewed on screen and then the applicant is given the opportunity to rank those jobs most preferred in order of perceived personal attractiveness.
When this is done, there is an option to view descriptions of the two most highly favoured jobs. These same descriptions are printed out on the personalised report.
