Strong Inventory Test
The Strong Interest Inventory assessment is one of the world’s most respected and widely used career planning tools. It provides robust insights into a person’s career interests. It helps them discover potential careers they may not have considered and gives them a wealth of information about how they approach the world of work.
This Test measures the subject’s interest in a broad range of occupations, work activities, leisure activities, and school subjects. The questionnaire compares how these interests are similar to the interests of people successfully employed in those occupations. It is used to help people understand their work interests and to illustrate the kinds of work in which they might be most satisfied.
The Strong Interest Inventory uses Holland codes, which are personality types created to measure an individual’s “type” and match it with a list of career choices that would be a good fit for that individual. SII contains 291 items that ask users about their preferences in regard to occupations, subject areas, activities, leisure activities, people and characteristics.
Pedagogical Information
The Strong Inventory assessment provides strong insight into a person’s interests, so you can help them to consider potential careers, their educational path and the world of work. It is backed by more than 80 years of research into how people of similar interests are employed, and what motivates individuals in the workplace. It delivers effective and powerful results that contribute to one person’s success. The Strong Inventory Test is broken down if four areas of interest, namely: The General Occupational Themes: created to provide an economical organization for the Strong Interest Inventory Profile, detailing an individual’s general attitude towards specific broad interest fields. The Basic Interest Scales: created to provide additional means of explaining high and low scores on the General Occupational Theme Scales through measuring an individual’s penchant for certain subject areas and activities. The Occupational Scales: form the foundation of the Strong Inventory and which relate specific occupations with various interests and qualities that individuals in each occupation identify with. The Personal Style Scales: the newest additions to the inventory starting with the 1994 edition. Added to provide a means to measure comfort with broad styles of living and working, including areas such as how a person prefers to be taught, how an individual finds that they best accomplish tasks related to work and whether they prefer working alone or with other people, how an individual feels about taking a management role and how an individual feels about taking risks. A final component of the Strong Interest Inventory is a series of indexes that allow interpreters and individuals to understand more atypical profiles that may not match the scales of the Test. The information gathered from these scales comes together to provide one with a picture of where one‘s interests lie and which jobs or school majors match these interests. Each scale is ranked by the individual’s scores, so one is not simply told their highest scores. Each person will see specific patterns that come with the Strong Interest Inventory (such as what second highest scales was, which can contribute to the ideal occupational path).Applied in projects
FairGuidance
Seven organisations with different expertise in education and guidance counselling (from Bulgaria, Germany, and Romania) have worked together on this project for two years.
The project focuses on people with few professional skills, persons in an unstable employment, unemployed persons, or people of low social standing or from disadvantaged areas. Migrant background can be another motive, surely without being considered a criterion for disadvantage or poor access to education itself.
These categories of beneficiaries coming from disadvantaged backgrounds are in need of more individualised guidance services. Thus, the project meets also the field-specific priorities in adult education:
– “providing information on access to adult learning services, such as information on the validation of non-formal and informal learning and career and education guidance”
– “improving and extending the offer of high quality learning opportunities tailored to individual adult learners, including through innovative ways of outreach and delivery”
– “developing adult educators’ competences to deal with diversified groups of learners, make use of new technologies for better outreach and teaching outcomes”.
FairGuidance addresses all these policy objectives in the field of Vocational education and training (VET) and adult education.
