Psychology 101: The 101 Ideas, Concepts and Theories that Have Shaped Our World - Adrian Furnham 2021

Vocational Choice and Guidance: What Job are you Best Suited to?

Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1920)

What are you going to do when you grow up? Are you suited to your current job? In what sort of job would you be most happy and productive?

Vocational psychology concerns the reasons why people choose various vocations, the wisdom of those choices and the possibilities of giving them the best possible kind of advice, as to what to do, when and why. Many factors constrain job choices: ability, age, education, as well as social, economic and political factors. Many jobs are not available to individuals or competition for them is very strong. Quite simply, you cannot always get the job you want or are best suited to.

The fundamental purpose of vocational guidance is to help people make appropriate vocational choices and adjustment: to find out what you are good at, and love doing. This can facilitate the efficient and cost-effective functioning of organizations by the appropriate exploitation of individual assets and abilities.

Obviously because there are striking individual differences in ability, aptitude, needs, personality and interests, and job differences in the demands they make in terms of personal attributes and skills, people will do better in jobs for which their abilities are suited than in those vocations where their skills are incongruous.

Vocational (career) psychology focuses on people thinking about careers, preparing for the occupations of their choice and where appropriate, changing jobs or even leaving the world of paid work for things like ’early’ retirement. Occupational choice is determined by many factors, including socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, intelligence, aptitudes and interests, as well as the community from which people come.

Vocational psychologists help people explore their long-range personal and professional goals, look at personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as environmental threats and opportunities to examine salient and suitable career alternatives. Vocational guidance is one of the oldest areas of applied psychology.

Many organizations are becoming aware of the career development of employees. Over time it is quite common for people to be promoted in rank or level (concomitant changes in responsibilities and skills), or move horizontally or laterally (with functional or technical changes). These lead to significant changes, which the individual might or might not be able to cope with.

There have been two relatively simple models for vocational guidance.

First, the simple two-dimensional person—things, ideas—data grid. Where are you on this? Interested more in people than technology, interested more in ideas and concepts than data? A people—data person might be suited to a job in HR or in psychology. A things—data person is very different: happier perhaps in IT or accounts.

Without doubt the most important theory and test in this area is that of Holland who suggested that there are only six types of jobs and six types of people who fit them. This is the Hexagon on page 433. Within a person or environment, some pairs of ’types’ are more closely related than others. The relationship within (which yields a measure of consistency) and between (which yields a measure of congruency) personality types or environments can be ordered according to a hexagonal model, in which distances within and between the personality profiles and job codes are inversely proportional to the theoretical relationships between them. The types are ordered in a particular manner: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional (RIASEC).

The letters are listed in rank order, so that the type listed first is the type the person most resembles. As a useful and approximate way of showing the degrees of relatedness among the six types, they are arranged at the vertices of a hexagon, such that the closest are the most similar.

Thus, the investigative and artistic types are similar and hence closer together, because both are concerned with intellectual pursuits, although in different ways: the investigative type is more methodological and data orientated, the artistic type more spontaneous. By contrast, the investigative type who is relatively asocial and analytical differs most from the self-confident and persuasive enterprising type. Similarly, the spontaneous, disorderly and creative artistic type contrasts sharply with the self-controlled, conforming and unimaginative conventional type. The idea is all about fitting the round peg to the round whole: finding the most appropriate job given a person’s values, preferences and attitudes.

Holland’s model is without doubt the most sophisticated and investigated in the whole of vocational psychology. Various aspects of the theory have been tested, including its current relevance and cross-cultural applications.

PERSONALITY TYPES AND SALIENT CHARACTERISTICS

The brilliance of the RIASEC model is that it allows you to evaluate jobs and people in the same terminology. It is the most tested of all the theories in the area.

With the development of new technology some tasks and jobs are disappearing, while others are appearing. This means the world of vocational guidance has to keep up both by taking account of new ways of assessing people but also being very aware as to what jobs there are today.

REFERENCES

Furnham, A. & Walsh, J. (1991). The consequences of person—environment incongruence: absenteeism, frustration and stress. Journal of Social Psychology 131, 187—204.

Furnham, A. & Schaeffer, R. (1984). Person—environment fit, job satisfaction and mental health. Journal of Occupational Psychology 57, 295—307.

Holland, J. (1973). Making vocational choices: a theory of careers. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Prentice-Hall.

Holland, J. (1985). The self-directed search. Odessa, Florida: Psychological Assessment Resources.