Approaches To Vocational Guidance

There are lots of sources of college and career advice out there for young people making the transition to college. Most of it is not very helpful, and some of it is highly questionable. The common approach to vocational guidance for almost 100 years, for example, has been to see how your self-reported abilities match those reported by people in different jobs. The assumption is that if your abilities match people in a given job, or match what somebody thinks that job requires, then you would be a good candidate to go into that line of work. There are serious problems with this approach. First, just because you have the abilities to do a job does not mean that you will like it. It could be a major disappointment to go into a job because you can do it, only to find out that you hate it! Second, almost everyone has lots of abilities that match many different jobs, maybe hundreds of jobs. The abilities that occupational inventories ask about are not very specific to a particular job. In fact, when employers are asked what abilities they want in new employees, they almost always cite fairly broad attributes like good communication skills, ability to work in a team, good problem solving skills, creativity, or they cite virtues like honesty, integrity, accountability, and so forth. Clearly, none of these abilities help narrow down job choices in any meaningful way.

Of course, abilities are important to jobs, but in the opposite way that they are normally used. Your individual pattern of strengths and weaknesses don’t tell you what you should do, they tell you what you should not do. Of this, there can be no doubt. If you are not good at math, for example, you definitely have little potential to go into engineering. High level math skills are primary tools for all engineers, period. Likewise, if you have weak verbal skills and cannot write well, you should definitely not go into journalism. If you have poor physical-motor coordination you probably should not consider being a woodworker, potter, weaver, painter, or artisan of any kind; a dancer or dance instructor; a performer, or a professional athlete. If you are not mechanically inclined, you are poorly suited to be a repairperson, plumber, electrician, mechanic, and so forth. It may sound trite to say “Don’t go into fields that you are weak in,” but that is about all we can get out of ability inventories.

The fact is that it is not helpful to say “Get a job that capitalizes on your strengths,” Why not? For almost everyone, their relative strengths could match a very wide range of possible jobs. Any attempt to identify specific abilities to match specific jobs would be ludicrous. Could we use the question, “Would you be good at holding an electrical device with a glowing rod at one end and fusing two pieces of metal together?” to identify future welders? No, of course not. It does not matter if a person said, “Yes! I would be good at that!” This approach is fatally flawed. Even if the person is right: (1) they might be good at many other things as well, and (2) they might not like welding whatsoever. Lack of abilities can eliminate possible jobs, but abilities will never provide a valid basis for choosing specific jobs for anyone.

After ability inventories, the next most common approach to vocational guidance is based on personality. It sounds appealing at first that if jobs require different types of personalities, then assessing individual personality must provide a valid basis for optimally matching people to jobs that suit them. It sounds good, built it does not work. At all. It is simply not true that people currently in any specific jobs have similar personalities. In fact, the opposite is true. Take a look at people in virtually any vocation and you will find a wide variety of personalities. Yep, all over the map. But surely, certain types of people must be better at certain jobs, right? Nope. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), for example, is one of the most widely used and researched personality inventories in the world. Decades of research have failed to find any relationship between the MBTI personality types and job performance or job satisfaction. The results are so clearly negative that the publishers disavow any use of the MBTI for personnel assessment or employee selection.