Five Steps for Using Assessments

Transcription

1 People use career assessments to gather information about themselves and their needs so that they can make better career choices or take the appropriate next steps. Career assessments are key pieces of the career development puzzle because they help people understand who they are or who they are becoming. Career assessments are beginning points, not ending points, for learning. By capturing a snapshot, users may learn things about themselves or discover new career options that match their interests, skills, values, or abilities. Be sure that the career assessment you use is appropriate for the user. Using an assessment that is inappropriate for your client or student, will be of no use and could be misleading or confusing. Do not rely on assessments as the sole or absolute source of ideas for occupation matches. Rather, use lots of good information to facilitate quality career exploration and decisions. : 1. Establish the purpose 2. Select the assessment(s) 3. Administer the assessment(s) 4. Review the results 5. Help the user make decisions 1. Establish the Purpose People use several words to talk about career assessment tools: Assessment covers many types of instruments. Inventory is used to describe questionnaires designed to help people learn more about themselves, with no right or wrong answers. Survey is typically used to describe an even more informal inventory. Test typically describes a scientific measure of intelligence, ability, aptitude or achievement. Tests usually have right and wrong answers. Most career assessments are not tests; they simply help people understand more about themselves, and they do not have right or wrong answers. There are two categories of career assessments: Formal assessments have been administered to many students and have statistics that support the results. We often refer to these types of tests as standardized measures. 1

2 Informal assessments are less data driven. Most of the assessments in CIS are informal assessments. Many of the worksheets in Career Plan are informal assessments. Use formal or standardized tests to measure achievement, to compare performance against others of the same age or grade, or to compare strengths or weaknesses with peers. The SAT and ACT are common formal assessments. Use an informal assessment to gather personal insight. They can be useful supplements to formal assessments, but they may be imprecise. An informal assessment can help an individual see things in a different light, but it should not be used as the sole source for drawing any conclusions. By comparing two sets of results (formal and informal, for example) you can check for consistency, or the degree to which the two answer sets match. Assessments achieve many purposes. What is your purpose? Your purpose will help you select the assessment or assessments you use. 2. Select the Assessment CIS contains several types of career assessments, and you can find other career assessments on the Internet. Interest assessments compare interests with those of a reference group. Personality inventories provide clues to traits that will influence preferences. Occupations can be described using the same descriptors as personality traits. Work values assessments look at needs and identify occupations that allow values and needs to be expressed. Skills assessments identify strengths and occupations that use these. Aptitude tests attempt to measure native gifts. Achievement and ability tests measure what s been learned to date. Learning styles inventories help identify how individuals most readily learn. Employability skills surveys measure employability strengths and weaknesses. Results of these career instruments can help users see where they would find satisfaction and success in the workplace. Below is a list of the assessments found in CIS and some information about each: Career Cluster Inventory: helps users identify occupation clusters that include occupations with activities similar to those the user indicates liking. (The Career Cluster Inventory helps identify potential careers to consider.) Susan couldn t this sentence be said for all the assessments should we include it in all or remove it here. It asks 80 questions. It is very useful for young people and those seeking quick results. It takes 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Interest profiler: helps users identify their interests and then match those interests to a wide variety of occupations. It organizes results in six interest categories. It asks 180 items. Designed for those who are age 14 and older, it takes minutes to complete. 2

3 IDEAS: helps to identify interests and matches them to a wide variety of occupations. It is scored at grade/age-level, so scores are age appropriate. It asks 128 questions, and is appropriate for grades 7 to adult. IDEAS takes about 30 minutes to complete. SKILLS: helps to identify skills that are satisfying and matches them to occupations. It also helps users recognize how skills transfer between occupations. Users complete a card sort or worksheet before posting skill preferences on a computer. It takes 30 minutes to two hours, depending upon whether users complete the card sort or the worksheet. Best suited for upper high school and adult populations. Work Importance Locator: helps users learn more about needs and work values and identify occupations to explore. It is designed for use with a wide variety of populations, including workers in transition, unemployed workers, college students, and high school students. Users need a minimum of an eighth-grade reading level, and should be sixteen or older. Younger students may not have had the life experiences to adequately evaluate the items. It takes minutes to complete. Reality Check: helps users learn how much money they will need to earn and identify occupations that will provide a salary that meets their needs. It can also identify occupations that pay at a specific wage and show what lifestyle purchases are possible at that wage level. Finally, it can show how far dollars will stretch given a particular occupation salary. It takes about 30 minutes to complete. Useful for middle school and above; it is also informative for those who have not been employed for some time or who have not yet entered the workforce. Entrepreneurial Career Assessment: helps users learn more about characteristics of entrepreneurs and compare themselves to these characteristics. It does not determine likely success or failure as an entrepreneur. However, it can provide insights into whether users have the attitudes, lifestyle, and behaviors of a successful entrepreneur. Appropriate for high school and above. Learning Styles Survey: helps users identify their learning style strengths and weaknesses. This informal survey teaches students about learning styles and some tips for better studying using their assessed style or styles. Takes 15 minutes to administer and score. Appropriate for grades Employability Skills Survey: helps users identify and self-assess the transferable and soft skills that employers value. Takes minutes to administer and score. Appropriate for grades six and above. 3. Administer the Assessment Career assessments can be completed on paper (CIS worksheets), on a computer or the Internet (CIS assessments). Regardless of how you administer an assessment, be sure to provide adequate time for users to think carefully about each answer. Approach the assessment with a positive attitude. The more your students and clients know about themselves, the more able they will be to choose an occupation. Allow time to complete the full assessment. On a computer assessment, if students or clients must leave the computer before they finish, be sure to have them Save their work. For most CIS assessments, when users return to CIS, they can click Restore Answer Set under Sort and 3

4 Assessment Results in My Portfolio. Users must be logged in to their portfolio in order to save an assessment in process. 4. Interpret the Results Ask users: do your assessment results make sense to you? Do you see occupations that interest you? Do the personality types listed in your results fit? Do themes emerge among your various assessment results? If the results do not make sense to users or you or the user disagrees with the results, discuss this on an individual basis. Use career assessments in conjunction with other information to make career decisions and plans. Explore with users the occupations in their assessment results. Encourage further research into the occupations by linking to CIS Occupations. If you administered an assessment outside CIS and it is listed in the Assessment Link, then you easily can find occupations that match that assessment s results. 5. Help the User Decide Ask users to note something they learned and a decision or plan they will make by using the Save tool in CIS. Saving their thoughts about the assessment results encourages users to understand their results and recall what was worth noting at a later point in time. Reflecting on an assessment also helps users make meaning of and personally evaluate their assessment results. Help users identify actions they will take based upon their results, steps for moving forward with career goals. Examples of actions include: Research three occupations on the list. Find and talk with someone working in one of the occupations on the list to learn more about the occupation. Discuss results with a respected friend or adult. Take more coursework, because several occupations of interest require a strong background in a specific course area. Few people make major career decisions based upon one career assessment, but most find assessments help them develop a better picture of themselves. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make a good career decisions without gathering lots of quality information. Quality career decisions require users to: Complete several career assessments Talk with others (example: talking with an aunt about her job), Read quality career information (example: read a local employer s brochure, surf the Internet on occupation titles) Experience something firsthand (example: participate in a job shadow) Study a topic by taking a related course (example: take a career and technical education class) 4

5 Evaluate options carefully (example: look at costs, time required, wages, and other key factors) Formulate a thoughtful plan for success (example: what you can do in the Make Plans section of Career Plan?) Ask users to look at themselves and answer these questions: What kinds of activities interest me? How might my values impact my job, occupation, or program of study choice? What skills do I have and what ones do I want to build? What am I naturally good at (aptitudes), and do I like to use these gifts? CIS Career Plan worksheets contain informal assessments that also help answer these and other question about who users are and who they are becoming. The informal assessments found in Tools for Counselors and Teachers answer questions about these and other important career development concerns. Cautions with Assessments Career assessments can be very informative for those who are unaware of occupations and career options. However, assessments have potential drawbacks. A career assessment may not address individual needs. In addition, sometimes people need the help of a trained counseling professional to make sense of and use career assessments. Finally, many assessments are based on individual viewpoints, so if users answer questions based on what others want for them or from a culturally disadvantaged perspective, or they don t understand themselves well, or they struggle to identify their skills and positive traits, then their results may not be accurate. Some people retake CIS assessments because they seek different results or want to see how answering items differently produces different results. In Career Cluster Inventory, Interest Profiler, IDEAS and the Work Importance Locator, users need to log out and log back in to retake the assessment. In other assessments, link back to the assessment in CIS and start over. Encourage users to question results that do not make sense. Review the items to understand why certain occupations surfaced on the user s list and others did not. Assessment Link Assessment Link connects the results of career assessments taken outside CIS to occupations or clusters within CIS. Assessment link contains assessments that meet CIS quality standards and those that are commonly used by CIS clients and students. The O*NET Interest Profiler and IDEAS can be taken in CIS, but most of the assessments listed below cannot. Since some users come to CIS having completed assessments previously, Assessment Link allows them to see career information that corresponds to those earlier results. Assessment Link includes: Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) Career Assessment Inventory (CAI) Career Decision-Making Revised (CDM-R) 5

6 Career Occupational Preference System (COPS) and COPS Form P CareerScope Differential Aptitude Test (DAT) IDEAS Kuder Career Search (KCS) and KCS 16 O*NET Interest Profiler (IP) PLAN Self-Directed Search (SDS) Strong Interest Inventory (SII) 6