Qualitative Career Assessment: A Higher Profile in the 21st Century?

Qualitative career assessment has been variously described as “informal forms of assessment” (Okocha, 1998, pp. 151–152), and as “methods that are flexible, openended, holistic, and nonstatistical” (Goldman, 1992, p. 616). Common forms of qualitative career assessment include card sorts, timelines, and genograms, all of which demand a proactive role for clients in the assessment process. Capturing much of what has previously been said, a more comprehensive description explains that qualitative assessment “involves non-standardised and non-quantitatively based measurement that provides an informal means of gaining a more holistic and integrative understanding of personal meanings associated with life experiences” (Palladino Schultheiss, 2005, p. 382). Consequently, in recent years qualitative career assessment has been strongly aligned with constructivist theory and approaches to career counselling with their emphasis on active agency and the construction of meaning within the context of life. However, it should not be assumed that all qualitative career assessment is constructivist in orientation as some can be used in more traditional objective, matching and predictive ways that are in keeping with the logical positivist worldview. Indeed, the logical positivist worldview informs most career assessment which is in general quantitative in nature. Such assessment has retained a high profile in career counselling work compared with qualitative career assessment which has to date had a very limited profile. However, McMahon and Patton (2002) suggested that with greater adoption of constructivist approaches to career counselling there may be an opportunity in the 21st century for the more widespread use of qualitative career assessment, and that its place could be “strengthened relative to but not to the exclusion of quantitative assessment” (p. 58). Therefore it is hoped that this chapter will assist in raising the profile of qualitative career assessment within the career development field. This chapter is however, in no way intended to promote one form of assessment over the other. Both have a purpose and both offer a range of potential benefits to clients, and can operate in complementary ways. Rather, this chapter will overview qualitative assessment in career counselling. First it will discuss assessment in career counselling and then it will provide a brief history of qualitative career assessment. Following this, the