From the General Public
There is a single right occupation for everyone. Much of the vocational counseling movement has been based on this premise. Although it is undoubtedly true that there are appropriate and inappropriate occupations for almost everyone, it seems futile to attempt to find the job that exactly fits the client. Given the uncertainties of today's job market, finding the right job seems especially doubtful. Clients may view finding the right academic major or job idealistically as holding the promise of drastically improving the quality of their lives. Everyone knows people who floundered and then became highly successful; clients sometimes believe that they can duplicate this experience through identifying the occupational interest that exactly fits them. Occasionally it is possible through such means for a client to transform apathy into interest and become motivated but such hopes are largely illusory.
Vocational diagnosis can achieve pinpoint accuracy in a relatively short time without making demands on the client. The general public would like vocational counseling to be like their ideal concept of medicine: the physician asks a few questions, pokes around, runs some laboratory tests, and is then able to pinpoint the problem in a quick, definite, and painless manner. What the general public does not realize is that medicine rarely works this way and that vocational counseling doesn't either.
Everyone can find inherent satisfactions in his or her occupation. Although it is pleasant to idealize work as fulfilling and meaningful, this is simply not the case for many workers. Large numbers of people do not have any particular pride in the work that they do, nor do they derive much satisfaction from it other than their pay check. Work itself seems to many people simply a means of enabling them to enjoy themselves during their nonworking hours. If satisfactions are available at all they may be the result of enjoyable work associates, status, or the ability to structure one's work rather than the result of the job function.
From Vocational Test Makers
Occupational groups are sufficiently homogeneous to be clearly differentiated from other occupational groups. Certainly there are some differences among groups of occupations but differences within occupations have often been disregarded. Many occupations include a wide variety of work tasks in addition to important personality differences among people with the same occupational title. Nurses and physicians each serve roles of patient care, administration, research, teaching, laboratory work, and operative care. The extent to which all members of a given occupation are alike has been oversimplified in order to conceptualize occupational groups.
One ought to choose an occupation in which one resembles members of that occupation. This assumption is particularly evident in the Strong Vocational Interest Blank (SVIB), the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory, and the Kuder form DD. Someone characterized the theory behind SVIB as being that birds of a feather flock together. Certain similarities are necessary between an aspirant and members of the aspired-to occupational group, other similarities are only convenient, others are simply comfortable. A number of vocational test antagonists have questioned the extent to which interest inventories such as the SVIB have narrowed the range of personality differences within an occupational group. Such narrowing may restrict the kind of changes and growth that can occur within the occupations and the people in them.
The more generalized the occupational interest, the greater is the likelihood that one of the occupations in the category will be entered. This is the assumption behind primary patterns on the SVIB. This is also the assumption behind the Holland Vocational Preference Inventory, on which the number of occupations selected within a personality type is tallied. One of the occupations in the type with the highest number of selected occupations is assumed to be appropriate for the test taker. It is quite conceivable (although this happens infrequently) that someone could have a high degree of interest in a particular occupation without necessarily having interests in related occupations.
From Vocational Counselors
Vocational tests predict the specific occupation that a person will enter. The SVIB looks as though it is based on this assumption. However, the makers of the SVIB have urged that such use is not feasible. Rather, they ask that the results be used to get a general sense of vocational interests and possible direction. Vocational interest inventories are accurate in that high scores often predict occupational entry. The SVIB is accurate approximately 50 per cent of the time in the sense that one of several high scores will relate to the occupation entered.
Vocational interest test results are more accurate than the expression of vocational interests. Dolliver reviewed comparative studies with the SVIB and reported that the expression of interest was more frequently accurate in predicting future occupation than was the SVIB. Whitney reported a similar finding for other vocational interest inventories.
It is not only possible but also sensible to do vocational counseling apart from educational and personal counseling. When vocational counseling is carried out in this manner, it is easy for clients to believe that their choice of an occupation does not involve their total personality and does not involve the consideration of educational ability and opportunity. Separating vocational counseling from other kinds of counseling, so that the counselor deals only with certain aspects of the client, has helped to make vocational counseling seem rather dull and unappealing to many counselors. The term career counseling has been used by some counselors to designate a wider range of counseling activities than is sometimes indicated with the term vocational counseling.
From Vocational Clients
Doubts, confusion, uncertainties, lack of information, lack of commitment, and lack of decision regarding one's occupational future are usually superficial. Clients may assume that the counselor, with the aid of vocational tests, will be able to identify a heretofore unknown but readily acceptable pattern of interests, abilities, and personality traits that will solve their vocational choice problem. Some clients do not manifest this belief but many hope that significant portions of this assumption are true.
Vocational counseling will be a rather impersonal process demanding little of the client in discomfort, commitment, or effort. The client may assume that various standardized tests will carry the major burden for both the client and counselor. Vocational inventories certainly have a moderate place in vocational counseling but their place easily becomes exaggerated by clients and counselors who do not understand the limitations of such inventories. The willingness, even desire, to rely on tests and inventories is puzzling, given the importance that such decisions may have in the clients' lives. Presumably, counselors have played a part in perpetuating the assumption that good vocational decisions can be made with such little effort from the client.
Good vocational counseling can reduce to almost zero the client's risk in heading for an occupation. Vocational counselors ought to reduce the amount of uncertainty and risk engendered in heading toward an occupation but a number of uncertainties will remain. Selection for training programs is often made from an oversupply of qualified applicants. Sometimes counselors can help clients by providing them with a view of the degree of risk involved, for example, in applying to law school. Sometimes when training has been completed there are no appropriate jobs available. Many unknowns remain in the best occupational plans and the client inevitably carries the risk.
A whole subset of assumptions involves sexist vocational roles; they are beyond the scope of this paper. Both women and men today resist being pushed toward or denied an occupation solely because of sex-role stereotypes. Assumptions about working women are described by Guttman, Matthews, the U.S. Department of Labor and Zytowski.
