Assessing Interests

What do you like to do? It's a simple question, and we think it's a great place to start the conversation. Before we get to anything more formal, take a few minutes yourself and with your teen to think about what each of you likes to do. Ask yourself what you spend your time doing when you're not being required to do anything at all. Jot down the top five or six things that come to mind. For me (Steve), the list looks something like this:

• Traveling
• Working and playing with technology
• Speaking in public
• Researching topics in business and in education
• Trying new restaurants
• Singing as well as playing and listening to music

Since I'm in my mid-forties, I have had many years of life experience to help build this list. I've tried things that I haven't liked very much and others that I liked a lot. I spent a lot of time in school. I have worked for several companies and in many different roles. I have started and stopped various hobbies. Even so, these answers provide only limited career direction. They're helpful but definitely not sufficient to help me choose from thousands of different career opportunities. Teenagers have much more limited experience to draw on.

To help a teen whose exposure to various areas of interest has been limited and to help an adult dig deeper to potentially discover areas of previously unidentified interest, it can be helpful to complete a more formal assessment. The most widely used framework for assessing occupational interests comes from the work of psychologist John L. Holland, beginning in the 1950s. Responding to his own frustrations with the career assessments of the time, Holland spent more than forty years developing and refining his theory of career choice. Through his work, Holland identified six occupational themes:

• Realistic: Involving practical, hands-on problems and solutions
• Investigative: Working with ideas, research, and thought work
• Artistic: Using forms, designs, and patterns with freedom to create
• Social: Serving or interacting with people
• Enterprising: Launching and leading projects
• Conventional: Following standard operating procedures and attending to detail

These themes, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation RIASEC, describe the type of work one might expect to do in a particular job and can be used to match individuals with potential careers.

Several assessments have been developed to help identify compatible occupational themes. One of the most common instruments U.S. schools use to help kids determine their career interests is the O*NET Interest Profiler produced by the U.S. Department of Labor. It's available in paper form or for download, and it has been incorporated into many widely used online college and career planning tools. The assessment includes 180 items to which one responds “like,” “dislike,” or “?”. Items include “build kitchen cabinets” and “record information from customers applying for charge accounts.” Based on the responses, the assessment identifies one primary theme and two secondary themes, which are aligned to a database the Department of Labor maintains containing more than nine hundred occupations. Someone whose primary theme is enterprising might be inclined toward starting a business or working in an early-stage company, while someone whose primary theme is investigative might find a role as a researcher or analyst more appealing.

The O*NET Interest Profiler is broadly used, but it's just one of many tools available to assess occupational themes. There are many other categories of tools that look at characteristics such as strengths, personality type, and learning styles that can also be useful in developing a picture of what may help someone succeed in school and in a career.

It's worth noting that Holland's occupational themes aren't specific to any one field. They simply describe the type of work. Realistic jobs are found in hospitality and investigative jobs in finance. But industry can also be an important factor in selecting a career. To link an occupational theme to specific lines of work, career clusters can be helpful. Career clusters were developed with support from Advance CTE, an association of leaders in career and technical education. Each of the sixteen career clusters represents a group of occupations and industries that share common skills and knowledge:¹

• Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources
• Architecture and Construction
• Arts, A/V Technology, and Communications
• Business Management and Administration
• Education and Training
• Finance
• Government and Policy Administration
• Health Science
• Hospitality and Tourism
• Human Services
• Information Technology
• Law, Public Safety, Corrections, and Security
• Manufacturing
• Marketing
• Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
• Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics

As you're assessing interests, you can look at the combination of the occupational themes that you identify through the O*NET Interest Profiler or a similar assessment, as well as your preference for one or more career clusters. As a simple example, someone who has a strong preference for the artistic occupational theme and is passionate about working in education and training might look to be an art teacher in a school or an educator in a museum. The relationship between primary and secondary occupational themes can also lead in interesting directions. For example, someone whose primary theme is artistic but has enterprising and conventional as secondary themes and an interest in business management might consider combining those into a role with a small business that's focused on conservation work.

One challenge with the O*NET Interest Profiler is that it asks questions that may seem a bit odd or that may ask a young person to have an opinion on something that's he's never experienced. For example, asking a fourteen-year-old whether he likes to “build kitchen cabinets” can seem a bit strange. Other assessments with seemingly more age-appropriate questions are available and also align to Holland's RIASEC occupational themes. Even so, it's reasonable to ask whether any assessment completed in thirty to forty minutes can reveal meaningful insights on which to base life decisions. It's also reasonable to ask whether an assessment your teen completes will be meaningful enough to guide decisions that have long-term consequences.

Despite the occasional odd question, the O*NET Interest Profiler is highly regarded in research terms for both reliability (i.e., consistency) and validity (i.e., accuracy) as a measurement of Holland's occupational themes. Holland's occupational themes have also been shown to be stable over time for most people, meaning that an accurate measurement isn't likely to change much as we age. For this reason, the O*NET Interest Profiler is considered a good first step in evaluating career interests.

Like any other assessment, however, interpreting the results requires some judgment. We often hear from students in schools we work with that the assessment results they receive are “fairly accurate,” but that doesn't mean they should be deterministic. When I was in tenth grade, I completed a career assessment similar to today's O*NET Interest Profiler. Because it was the mid-1980s, the test was done with paper and pencil, but otherwise the process was fairly similar to what most of today's students do by computer. I answered a series of questions, and after the assessment was scored, I received some guidance about my interests and a list of careers that might appeal to me. While I don't remember any of the others on the list, more than thirty years later I can still vividly recall the top recommendation: county clerk. My reaction was mostly confusion. I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, and I knew little about how local government worked. I had never met our county clerk, and I had no idea what the job entailed.

Unfortunately, that's where the lesson ended. We completed the assessment during a single English class and got the results a short while later. But we didn't learn much about how the results could guide us in a more thoughtful career search or how we should think about the specific career recommendations provided by the assessment. As a result, that lesson had little lasting impact on me other than providing a useful anecdote for conversations with school counselors about career planning and for this book. The good news is that career counseling practices in middle and high schools have advanced quite a bit since the mid-1980s, and you and your teen will probably find any school-based career assessment activity more meaningful than it was for me.

Whether done at school, with a private counselor, or in the home, we view an assessment like the O*NET Interest Profiler as the start of a process and the results it provides as the basis for further discussion and research. In that sense, it's more like a paper map than the turn-by-turn directions you get today from your smartphone.

Assessing Strengths

What comes to mind when someone asks you about your strengths? Do you think about skills or talents, such as the ability to write clearly or solve difficult math problems? Do you focus instead on positive attributes or personality traits, such as optimism or resilience? Maybe you think about a mix of these. For some, the response to being asked about strengths is to think immediately about weaknesses or blind spots.

Over the past thirty years, a wide range of research has been done in the field of strengths-based leadership. Academic researchers and leadership development firms have looked at the definition of strengths and how they influence academic and career performance. This research has looked at talents, experience, expertise, personality traits, and more. Taken together with interests and an understanding of what work means to you, strengths are a critical lens through which to consider college and career options.

Probably the easiest way to get started with strengths is to think about compliments that you get. Maybe a friend has appreciated your loyalty or an employer has thanked you for your attention to detail. If you have a hard time thinking about compliments, ask those who know you best to share what they think you do especially well. Their answers may surprise you, and depending on what they are, it might not be obvious right away how those strengths will help you in college or in a career. You may also find that what people tell you are your strengths don't line up well with what you've identified as your interests, at least at first.

While I was working on this chapter, I spoke with a colleague about her experience with strengths. She mentioned that people she works with often compliment her project management skills. She appreciated the positive feedback, of course, but she wasn't sure how to react. Managing projects wasn't something she enjoyed doing. But as she thought more about it, she considered what makes a good project manager. Although project management itself wasn't something she wanted to do as a career, she came to realize that many of the skills that led other people to compliment her as a project manager also made her successful in other areas. Project managers are good communicators. They're good at tracking detail, inspire their teams, solve problems well when they arise, and negotiate well. Each of these skills can serve her well in lots of potential careers, including her role doing research into potential new products. As her experience shows, it can be helpful to think broadly about strengths and consider the underlying skills that you can use to support many different academic and career paths.

Simply put, strengths are your best attributes. They are positive factors and describe things that you can do well. Among the leaders in studying strengths is Gallup, which defines strengths as “the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity.” According to Gallup, strengths come from a combination of talents, knowledge, and skills. Gallup offers two assessments, StrengthsFinder and StrengthsExplorer, that can help you identify strengths. StrengthsFinder, designed for late teens and adults, has 180 items and takes thirty to forty minutes. StrengthsExplorer is meant for children between the ages of ten and fourteen and has seventy-six questions. It takes about fifteen minutes to complete. Both assessments are available for purchase online, and many schools and colleges also provide Gallup's strengths assessments to staff and students. If your child's school uses Naviance, the school can provide student access to StrengthsExplorer at no additional charge.

Gallup groups strengths into themes: ten for StrengthsExplorer and thirty-four for StrengthsFinder. For StrengthsExplorer, the themes are:²

• Achieving: Youths especially talented in the Achieving theme like to accomplish things and have a great deal of energy.
• Caring: Youths especially talented in the Caring theme enjoy helping others.
• Competing: Youths especially talented in the Competing theme enjoy measuring their performance against that of others and have a great desire to win.
• Confidence: Youths especially talented in the Confidence theme believe in themselves and their ability to be successful in their endeavors.
• Dependability: Youths especially talented in the Dependability theme keep their promises and show a high level of responsibility.
• Discoverer: Youths especially talented in the Discoverer theme tend to be very curious and like to ask “Why?” and “How?”
• Future Thinker: Youths especially talented in the Future Thinker theme tend to think about what's possible beyond the present time, even beyond their lifetime.
• Organizer: Youths especially talented in the Organizer theme are good at scheduling, planning, and organizing.
• Presence: Youths especially talented in the Presence theme like to tell stories and be at the center of attention.
• Relating: Youths especially talented in the Relating theme are good at establishing meaningful friendships and maintaining them.

When you complete StrengthsExplorer, the assessment results list your top three themes. For StrengthsFinder, the results generally include your top five themes, although you can also choose to see how strongly your results indicate each of the other themes.

Strengths versus Weaknesses

At the beginning of the chapter, we asked what comes to mind when you think about your strengths. For some, it's hard to think about strengths without also considering weaknesses. In fact, many people spend more time thinking about weaknesses than strengths, believing that improving on weaknesses is the optimal path to self-improvement.

Gallup's research found that this focus on weaknesses spans cultures, age groups, and levels of education: “Whether we asked the question of the American population, the British, the French, the Canadian, the Japanese, or the Chinese, whether the people were young or old, rich or poor, highly educated or less so, the answer was always the same: weaknesses, not strengths, deserve the most attention.”³ Most people, it seems, worry more about fixing their weaknesses than building on their strengths. Research by Gallup and others suggests this is a mistake. It's not that weaknesses should be ignored, but, on balance, you are likely to have greater success by building from a position of strength than by trying to compensate for an area of weakness.

Zenger Folkman, a leadership development consultancy, has looked at the qualities that allow some leaders to stand out among their peers. Their research is based on more than 850,000 assessments conducted of leaders by peers and subordinates. In Key Insights from the Extraordinary Leader, Zenger Folkman found that “the key to developing great leadership is to build strengths.”⁴ Yet they noted that the executives with whom they work consistently “ignore the pages describing their strengths, and immediately focus on the weaknesses.”⁵ This instinct to focus on weaknesses comes with an opportunity cost: a reduced focus on building strengths, which is problematic since “the more strengths people have, the more likely they are to be perceived as great leaders.”⁶

It's not that weaknesses should be ignored. Some weaknesses are so limiting that they can inhibit strengths. In other cases, weaknesses can get in the way of your interests. For example, if you're interested in a career in engineering but struggle with math, you'll need to work to overcome that weakness to achieve success. The best advice we can offer is to look for opportunities where your interests and strengths align and build from there.

Using Interests and Strengths When Exploring Colleges and Careers

Knowing what I do now about how to explore careers, if I could go back to that day in tenth grade English when I was advised to be a county clerk or if I were sitting with a teenager today, I would still use an assessment to think about interests, and I'd also include a separate assessment of strengths, but would approach the entire lesson a little differently:

1. Establish context. Before your teen takes any assessment, talk with her about the various factors that can influence a successful career choice. Explain that interests and strengths are useful lenses through which to consider career options, but that timing, financial realities, and other issues also play a role.
2. Set expectations. Discuss the assessment that you're using. If you plan to use the O*NET Interest Profiler, acknowledge that some of the language may be unfamiliar but encourage your teen to look past it while focusing on the benefit of the assessment results. It may be helpful to explain the research that went into it to encourage her to take the process seriously.
3. Think expansively. Most of us are guilty of going straight to the last page of an exam or research paper to see the grade while skipping past any comments the teacher provided, yet the comments are often extremely helpful. The same is true of career assessment results. Instead of focusing on a specific list of jobs, encourage your teen to read and consider any comments about the results and think broadly about any specific careers and what direction those may provide as she considers all of her options.
4. Start a conversation. Don't let the assessment result be an end in itself. The career assessment that recommended a career as a county clerk for me could have been a solid basis for a discussion about what a county clerk does, whether that might be appealing to me, and whether any of those responsibilities would be good qualifications for other jobs. Unfortunately, the results didn't prompt any discussion, and the activity was a waste of time.

Are Careers Inherited?

When we're talking about career exploration with teens, one of the greatest challenges is their limited personal experience. As research has shown, other family members' career choices can be hugely influential, as can the examples of other community role models.

Facebook's data science team has done some interesting work in this area. Using the massive amount of data that Facebook generates about its members, researchers looked at how parental and sibling careers influence other family members' career choices. Two of the data scientists who worked on the project shared their findings in an article, “Do Jobs Run in Families?”⁷ They found that for many occupations, there is a relationship between parents' careers and the careers their kids chose. Similarly, there is a relationship among siblings' career choices, which is even stronger among twins. The authors note, for example, that sons whose fathers serve in the military are five times more likely to enter the military than other men and that daughters whose fathers worked as scientists were 3.9 times as likely to choose to work as scientists themselves.

The article is careful to note that despite the striking examples they provide, many more children strike out on their own than follow in the footsteps of their parents and siblings. It also doesn't attempt to demonstrate the cause for the relationships, which can also be heavily influenced by factors such as education level, socioeconomic status, and gender, among others, that correlate with job choices.

So while parents' and siblings' career choices influence other family members, the choices made by others in the community and the availability of role models are also important. These effects can be extreme in communities with high levels of poverty and unemployment, where the examples of various career paths are often limited. But these effects can also be meaningful in rural areas or other communities where young people don't have exposure to many different career paths. Not surprisingly, it's hard for kids to envision themselves doing jobs that they don't know exist. For this reason, we encourage you to help your teen cast a wide net and explore opportunities that may not be immediately obvious.

Future-Proofing Career Choices

One of the reasons that we encourage you to treat a career interest assessment as one element of a broader career research effort is that job opportunities change dramatically over time.

The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated that 65 percent of today's elementary school students will work in careers that don't yet exist. Consider that as this book is being published in 2017, many of the technologies that we now take for granted are younger than the teens we're coaching. Google has existed for fewer than twenty years, and Facebook has been around for just thirteen. Apple will celebrate the tenth anniversary of its iPhone this year, and the App Store that enabled so many of the new capabilities that we now associate with smartphones came even later. Today, job listings for mobile application developers, data scientists, and social media managers are plentiful. These roles didn't exist when I completed my career assessment in high school.

A risk of taking recommended jobs too literally is that you prepare for the present at the expense of the future. The Department of Labor does an impressive job categorizing and updating the more than nine hundred occupations in its database, but with 125 million people employed full-time in the United States the level of variety is far greater than the list can capture, and new jobs are being created every day.

Even as the pace of change in careers accelerates, the research around interests has nevertheless remained remarkably stable for more than fifty years and provides a good basis from which to discuss the types of work that your teen might be best suited to do.

Connecting Your Interests and Strengths to High School Courses

So how does this focus on interests and strengths affect your high school course work? It's unlikely that you'll find listings in your high school course catalogue mapped to Holland's RIASEC or Gallup's strengths themes. It is, however, increasingly common in course catalogues to find references to career clusters and defined career pathways, which can be a great place to start. In some middle and high schools, some form of strengths assessment is part of the curriculum for students and a regular professional development activity for teachers, which helps to create a common vocabulary to discuss future opportunities.

Balancing the Ups and Downs

Coming back to the question that kicked off this chapter, should you choose your course work and career path based on what you love to do or extrinsic factors such as employment prospects and income? It's really a trick question since you need to balance both. Even as you try to apply your interests and strengths to developing a career pathway, financial realities may limit your flexibility. And even if you're lucky enough to find a job in a field that you love, great jobs come with ups and downs.

Many books encourage their readers to find a passion and stick with it. We tend to be a bit more pragmatic. Use each step in your education and career to move closer to your ideal combination of interests and strengths while considering for your financial needs.