Strong Interest Inventory®
When does a job evolve into a career or become a lifelong pursuit?
Usually, this only happens when individuals feel satisfied and fully engaged in their endeavours. Unfortunately, many working adults do not know whether their career decisions will allow them to pursue their interests - or if they are taking the best steps to move their career forward. Practitioners working with university and high school students find it even more daunting to help them find and select the right career path.
Please take a moment to view this short video that talks about the journey to find the career in which you and/or your clients can thrive. It is also very important to our well-being to be happy in what we do at work. Just click on the image.
For over 85 years, the Strong Interest Inventory® instrument has provided time-tested, research validated insights to help individuals in their search for a rich, fulfilling career. As one of the most respected and widely used career exploration assessments in the world, it has been used extensively in educational institutions and organisations of all sizes.
Explore the Model
Below you can see how the Strong Interest Inventory® instrument correlates with Holland’s RIASEC framework in the diagram below.
Explore the Strong Interest Inventory® Model
For providing a theoretical structure to the Strong, in 1974 John Holland’s psychology-based codes were incorporated into the instrument. Holland’s theory is based on four main assumptions:
- In our culture, most people can be categorised into six Themes and each person may be characterised by one Theme or some combination.
- Job environments can be divided into these same six Themes and each environment is dominated by a particular type of person. Thus, the personality types of co-workers, as much as job requirements, establish the working tenor of a given occupation.
- People search for environments that let them exercise their skills and abilities, express their attitudes and values, take on problems and roles they find stimulating and satisfying and avoid chores or responsibilities they find distasteful or formidable.
- Behaviour is determined by an interaction between a person’s personality and the characteristics of his or her working environment. Factors such as job performance, satisfaction and stability are influenced by this interaction.
As shown below, Holland’s theory organises the six Themes by placing them at the six points of a hexagon with those presumed to be the most closely related located adjacent to each other and those most dissimilar located across the hexagon from each other. The order in which they fall around the hexagon is frequently called the R-I-A-S-E-C order. The Strong is the only empirically derived RIASEC instrument.
Occupational Scales Update
In 2012, a review was undertaken of the Strong Interest Inventory® Occupational Scales to ensure that the instrument best reflected changes in the occupational world and our society and thus maintaining the scientific soundness of the instrument. The updated Strong Interest Inventory® instrument now includes a total of 260 Occupational Scales, including 90 new, updated or revised Occupational Scales, along with the 170 Occupational Scales remaining from the 2004 edition.
This update provides clients and career professionals alike with a wide variety of career options to consider and can help users make informed decisions about the future.
Certification in the Strong Interest Inventory® Instrument
The Strong instrument is what we call ‘Restricted’ and you need to be trained and certified to access and use it. This ensures that the instrument is used for the purpose for which it was designed and that it is being administered and interpreted correctly.
We offer a Certification Program that will qualify you in the professional and ethical administration of the Strong Interest Inventory® instrument and upon successful completion of the program, you will gain a certificate of qualification to purchase and use both the instrument and its reports.
Public Strong Interest Inventory® Certification Programs are currently available in Melbourne, Sydney, Manila and other locations in the Asia Pacific region upon request .
If you would like to discuss an in-house Certification Program for your organisation, please contact us .
Key Benefits
- Empowers your clients to discover their true interests so they can expand and explore various career options that will keep them engaged
- Relates your clients’ interest patterns to those of satisfied workers within an occupation
- Presents results on a variety of complementary themes and scales
- Delivers user-friendly, well organised and highly intuitive results
- When combined with the MBTI® Form M Career Report , provides your clients with a complete career development picture
Instrument Features
- Expanded response options to 5-point (Likert-type) format
- Updated General Occupational Themes (in 6 areas) that map out broad interest patterns to describe personalities and preferred work environments (corresponds to Holland’s RIASEC framework)
- Specific information about your clients’ areas of interest via 30 Basic Interest Scales
- Comparison of your clients’ interest patterns to those of satisfied workers within the occupation via 260 Occupational Scales
- Description of your clients’ preferred style of working, learning, leading, risk taking and team participation via 5 Personal Style Scales
- Less administration time
- Norm group representative of ethnic, racial and demographic workforce diversity
Applications
- Career Exploration
- Leadership Coaching
- Executive Coaching
- Talent Retention
Other Resources
The Cycles of Success: A Guide to Career Development and Assessment Insights eBook delves into how you can support your clients or employees through the process of enhancing, expanding and/or changing careers, which will then carry over to improve your talent management initiatives. It also includes how employees may support themselves when their company is not able to offer the resources needed for skill development in a given role, or to move beyond it.
We hope that you enjoy reading this publication and take some learnings away for your own career development.
Please click here to download the eBook.
Please note that translations are available for selected Strong products in the following languages:
French, French (Canadian), Portuguese - Brazilian
