Adi Amit

Where Have the Investigative Occupations Gone? Perceptions and Misperceptions of Occupations

How do people perceive occupations? Three empirical studies examined whether occupations are perceived in accordance with Hollands RIASEC model. The studies varied in measures (reported preferences, similarity judgments) and participants (university students, working adults, and university professors). Taken together, the findings indicate that perceptions of occupations partially comply with Hollands model: All four samples perceived the realistic, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional as distinct environments (with the latter two intermixed). Moreover, the order of these environments is congruent with Hollands RIASEC order. The most notable deviation from the RIASEC model was the consistent misperception of the investigative work environment. Participants in all three studies overlooked the commonalities among investigative occupations, instead perceiving these occupations in terms of their content (as expressed by their second or third Holland letter code). Implications for vocational research, career counseling, and selection processes are discussed.

The PreferenSort A Holistic Instrument For Career Counseling

We present the PreferenSort, a career counseling instrument that derives counselees’ vocational interests from their preferences among occupational titles. The PreferenSort allows for a holistic decision process, while taking into account the full complexity of occupations and encouraging deliberation about one’s preferences and acceptable trade-offs. We describe three validation tests: (a) comparing the vocational interests derived by the PreferenSort to those accumulated using Holland’s Self-Directed Search (construct validity); (b) exploring the relations between the participants’ derived interests and their field of study (concurrent validity); and (c) the degree of improvement in the prediction of the participants’ field of study in the derived over the accumulated vocational interests (incremental validity). As hypothesized, by allowing for a holistic decision process, the PreferenSort explains the vocational interests of intuitive individuals better. These findings provide evidence that the PreferenSort is important as a supplementary counseling tool for individuals with an intuitive decision style—people who currently lack self-help counseling instruments.