3.4: Qualitative Assessment Approaches

The qualitative or informal assessment process is a process by which the career professional asks questions, observes, and then asks more questions to assist a client to uncover their potential career pathways.

Qualitative assessment involves informal forms of assessment that allow for flexibility and interaction between the client and the counsellor. These assessments consider the whole person, integrating personal, social, and contextual factors.

Over the years, there has been a shift away from formal, quantitative assessments in favour of a more client-centred or qualitative assessment process. The client-centred approach in career counselling involves placing the client at the heart of the process. Clients actively participate in their own career exploration and decision-making. The counsellor acts as a facilitator, supporting the client’s self-discovery.

There are several reasons for this shift.

The qualitative career assessment process tends to be much more flexible. Kris Magnussen (1992) identified some benefits of informal or qualitative assessment processes, including:

• There is less likelihood of subjecting clients to gender, culture, or socioeconomic bias.
• The process is highly individualized, allowing the counsellor to customize their work to fit the client’s needs at that moment.
• The client is actively engaged in the process. It is highly participatory, which allows them to own the outcomes.
• The process allows the client and counsellor to explore in a creative manner that enhances both the focus and the enjoyment of the process.
• Finally, it’s a much more flexible approach, and it’s easy to move back and forth through the different processes, such as initiation and exploration.

McMahon and Watson (2015) provide an excellent summary of the benefit of this approach when they state, “Qualitative career assessment stimulates storytelling, and in doing so, facilitates learning about oneself through self-reflection and enhanced self-awareness.”

Types of Qualitative Assessment Processes

Interview Strategies

The interview process is the primary career counselling technique. The techniques for interviewing used in career exploration are very similar to the generic interviewing techniques associated with a personal counselling process.

Critical skills all counsellors need to know include using open-ended and closed questions, encouraging, paraphrasing, reflecting feelings, and summarizing. The skillful use of these processes and techniques can guide the client through an exploration of their interest, values, and experiences to enable effective career exploration.

An effective model for structuring an interview is the “Five Stage Counselling Session” (Ivey A.E., Ivey, M.B., Zalaquett, C.P., 2023). The stages provide a useful structure for guiding a client:

1. Empathic Relationship: Initiating the session with the client. Engaging in rapport building and structuring the interview.
2. Story and Strengths: Gathering information, drawing out stories, issues, concerns and or challenges.
3. Goals: Mutual goal setting; what does the client want to have to happen?
4. Restory: A working process to explore alternatives and confront incongruities and conflict. The client can rewrite their story to include strengths.
5. Action: Generalizing and action on new stories to move forward.

These five stages can form the foundation of the process of exploration. They can also provide a framework for integrating all other qualitative assessment approaches.

Significant Experiences

The process of “Significant Experiences” (Bolles, 2020) in career exploration is a reflective exercise that helps individuals understand their interests, skills, values, and motivations by examining the experiences in their lives that have been most meaningful to them. This process can be particularly useful for clients who are uncertain about their career path or looking to make a career change. Here’s an outline of how such a process may unfold.

1. Identification of Experiences

• Reflect on past experiences: Clients are encouraged to think about their past experiences across various aspects of their lives, including education, work, volunteer activities, hobbies, and personal challenges.
• List significant experiences: From this reflection, clients identify experiences that they found particularly engaging, satisfying, or challenging. These are moments that felt significant in some way, whether they were positive or negative.

2. Analysis of Experiences

• Examine each experience: For each identified experience, clients delve into why it was significant, what they enjoyed or found challenging, the skills they used or developed, and the values or interests it reflected.
• Identify common themes: By analyzing multiple experiences, clients can begin to see patterns or themes in the types of activities, environments, or roles that consistently bring them satisfaction or fulfillment.

3. Connection to Careers

• Research career options: Using the insights gained from their significant experiences, clients can explore careers that align with the themes, skills, and values they’ve identified. This might involve researching industries, roles, and job descriptions that match their interests.
• Reflect and adjust: Throughout the process, clients are encouraged to continuously reflect on their experiences and the satisfaction they derive from their career-related activities. This ongoing reflection allows adjustments to be made to their goals or plans.

The “Significant Experiences” process is iterative and may be revisited multiple times throughout an individual’s career. It is a powerful tool for self-discovery and making informed career decisions that lead to fulfilling professional lives.

Creating Self Portraits

“Creating Self-Portraits” is a career development process designed by Redekopp, Day, Magnusson, and Durnford (1993) to facilitate self-assessment and career exploration without relying on traditional testing methods. This approach stems from the recognition that conventional career tests often limit individuals by assigning them labels (e.g., personality types) that hinder further self-exploration and pigeonhole them into specific occupational roles without considering the full spectrum of their interests, values, and potential for growth.

The process adopts a developmental approach to career assistance, encouraging individuals to engage in a comprehensive self-examination process. This process involves exploring four key aspects of the self:

• Meaning (values, beliefs, interests, and barriers)
• Outcomes (visions for the future, including personal, work-related, and educational goals)
• Activities (preferred, past, and needed activities toward achieving one’s dream)
• Tools/Techniques (skills, knowledge, attitudes, and personal characteristics used in past activities)

The method utilizes a semi-structured interview format, which can be conducted individually or in groups, typically over one to three sessions. Responses are organized into four columns on a large sheet of paper, facilitating a holistic view of the individual’s self-concepts and aspirations.

The primary goal of the process is to empower individuals to understand themselves in a way that promotes ongoing self-discovery, accommodates change over time, and avoids restrictive labels or classifications. Doing so aims to help individuals make life and work choices that are meaningful and aligned with their personal values and dreams. Client feedback suggests that the process of creating Self-Portraits is enjoyable, reduces the pressure of making the “right” career decision, and enhances self-understanding and adaptability.

“Creating Self-Portraits” represents a novel approach to career development that emphasizes self-exploration and the dynamic nature of personal and occupational growth. By moving away from traditional testing and classification methods, it seeks to enable individuals to chart a career path that is truly reflective of their unique interests, values, and aspirations, thereby fostering a more fulfilling and adaptable approach to career planning and development.

Vocational Card Sorts

Vocational card sorts are a valuable resource in the career counsellor’s toolkit. They have been used since the early 1960s to help individuals explore various aspects of themselves. They are an interactive career counselling tool designed to aid individuals in exploring their career interests, values, and skills. This hands-on method facilitates self-discovery by allowing clients to sort through cards, each representing different aspects of careers and work life, such as specific occupations, work values, and skills. The process is structured to encourage reflection and discussion, helping clients articulate their preferences and align them with potential career paths.

The process begins with an introduction to the Vocational Card Sorts, where the counsellor explains the purpose and methodology of the tool. Clients are then presented with a set of cards to sort according to their interests or values, ranging from “highly interested” to “not interested” or “very important” to “not important.” This sorting phase is crucial as it prompts clients to consider what they value in a career, identify their skills, and explore what work environments or roles they find appealing.

Following the sorting activity, clients have a discussion with the counsellor to delve deeper into their selections. This conversation is key to uncovering deeper insights into the client’s career preferences, addressing misconceptions, and identifying knowledge gaps about certain careers. The counsellor’s role is to facilitate reflection, helping the client to understand why they favour certain options and how these preferences align with potential career opportunities.

Based on the outcomes of the sorting and discussion phases, the counsellor assists the client in narrowing down career options that best match their identified interests, values, and skills. This may involve further steps such as conducting research, engaging in informational interviews, or exploring educational pathways for the preferred careers.

Vocational Card Sorts (Osborn et al., 2015) offer several benefits, including promoting self-discovery, providing an engaging and tactile method for career exploration, and allowing customization to meet individual client needs. They serve as a foundational step in the career decision-making process, helping individuals to move from broad interests to specific, actionable career paths. Through this structured approach, clients gain clarity on their career-related preferences and how these align with available or desired career opportunities, ultimately facilitating informed and meaningful career choices.