A Publisher’s Commentary on Assessment Tools

By Angus McMurty

I got my introduction to assessment tools in the late 90’s. I was working with a number of other researchers on Career Cruising’s occupational database. We had just completed putting together several hundred in-depth occupation profiles and almost one thousand multimedia interviews for our CD-ROM and online versions of Career Cruising.

We thought we might have earned a little break, but the energetic counsellors and teachers using our program had other ideas!

Although they gave us great feedback on our occupation and education information, many felt that we were still missing one key piece of the career guidance resource puzzle: A really first rate self-directed assessment tool to help users learn more about themselves, find suitable occupation choices, and suggest a few career paths that they might not have previously considered.

Since our own background was in occupational research rather than assessment, we began to look for an established tool that we could incorporate into our program.

Thus began our journey into the fascinating and often controversial field of assessment. We quickly learned that there are a wide variety of assessment tools, which aim to measure a number of different qualities: interests, skills, goals, values, personality, or some combination of them.

Our initial, gut reaction to such tools was scepticism. Given the enormous variability and unpredictability of human nature, how accurate could assessment tools be? And how useful would occupational suggestions based on such assessments be?

Our scepticism, however, was allayed in two ways. In the first place, after taking a number of assessments ourselves, we had to admit that the better ones could be quite uncanny in their insightfulness and the suitability of their vocational recommendations.

Secondly, we realized that good assessment tools do not claim to provide a final answer or ideal career. Instead, they aim to facilitate an on-going reflective exploration of one’s personal qualities and their relation to the working world. When an assessment tool works well, it leaves users with a better understanding of themselves and the occupations that interest them. It also provides new ideas for further career research.

Fortunately, we found an excellent partner organization in CASCAiD, makers of the pre-eminent computer-aided career guidance program in Britain. CASCAiD’s software is currently used in over 85% of England’s school and all of its adult guidance centres. Its system has been translated or adopted for use in Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Singapore and a number of other countries.

CASCAiD’s guidance software products offer a wide range of features, but their centrepiece is a career matching system. As the name suggests, a career matching system helps a user match his or her personal preferences with specific occupations in a database. CASCAiD and the University of Loughborough originally developed their career matching system 30 years ago, and it has been continuously revised and updated ever since.

We named our version of CASCAiD’s matching system “Career Matchmaker” and set out to adapt it to Career Cruising and the Canadian context. As it turned out, this was not always a straightforward task.

First of all, many of the assessment questions had to be tweaked to account for differences between British and Canadian audiences. One obvious example was changing “lorries” to “trucks” in a question concerning whether or not the user enjoyed driving vehicles. But there were also many subtle differences in word usage that had to be carefully considered.

Second, we had to ensure that the system took into account all special Canadian labour market conditions. This meant thoroughly researching every occupation in our database to ensure that the kinds of preferences, or aspects, assigned to them were appropriate and accurate.

In the end, we were very pleased with the results and how easily Career Matchmaker was incorporated into our client organizations’ existing guidance activities. Indeed, Career Matchmaker’s matching system is intentionally NOT based on any specific model of career guidance or occupational psychology. The focus has instead been on developing a flexible tool that can be used with whatever guidance model an organization has adopted.

Our encounter with assessment tools has thus been a very valuable learning experience. We gained a great deal of insight into the different approaches used by various tools and how they are created and maintained—as well as a better understanding of our own qualities and how they relate to the world of work. Finally, at a very practical level, the prospect of losing my job and having to re-examine my relationship to the working world is now much less scary!

Angus McMurtry is the co-founder of Career Cruising. He is currently working towards a PhD in Education at the University of Alberta, with research focusing on complex systems theory and its application to workplace learning.