The History of Interest Inventories and Career Assessments in Career Counseling

Interest inventories and career assessments continue to be used to support practitioners as they work to uncover client interests, abilities, skills, motivations, values, and other personal factors that help individuals self-define and construct their career. The skilled use of career inventories and assessments remains a minimum competency of career service providers' ability to successfully partner with their clients. A history of the evolution of assessment from 1914 through 1974 and considerations for the future of assessment are highlighted to provide historical perspective to inform practitioners as they serve the diverse needs of complex client populations.Keywords: interest inventories, career assessment, career counseling, vocational goalAlthough interest inventories have been a dominant career practitioner methodology for service delivery to clients, few have studied or recognized the changes that have occurred within these instruments over the years. As a significant component in the field of career counseling, career assessment can be seen as a "bridge from career development theory to practice, a method of operationalizing theoretical constructs by incorporating them into career interventions and, in particular, into tests and other measurements" (Whitfield, Feller, & Wood, 2009, p. 14). A history of the development of assessments, tools, and interventions allows us to understand motivations, trends, and environmental/social/ political factors that have affected how we historically and currently serve clients. Practitioner knowledge of the evolution of assessment in the field of career counseling is critical to inform how career counselors move forward to ensure that clients remain the top priority as career counselors continue to innovate and develop career services.With an ever-changing U.S. workplace and economic environment, clients face a future where 63% of all jobs will require a postsecondary education, more than one third of all job openings will not require a college degree, one third of the jobs will require 1 month or less of onthe-job experience to fully qualify, and only 76% of public high school students will earn a diploma within 4 years of entering the ninth grade (otherwise stated, 1 million students will fail to earn a high school diploma each year; Rumberger, 201 1 ). In reaction to these factors, career counselors may search for additional applications of inventories to cope with and support their clients, which increasingly include returning veterans, laid-ofF workers, and students leaving school with skills deficits and heavy debt.To serve the complex needs of diverse client populations, career practitioners will benefit from a history of the evolution of assessment from 1914 through 1974, past uses of available resources, and key takeaways that inform the future of assessment on a global level. The majority of inventories in this history are out of print. Inventories that continue to be in use or were developed in the second half of the history (beyond 1974) are referenced for the reader to obtain more information in the National Career Development Association's (NCDA) A Counselor's Guide to Career Assessment Instruments (hereinafter referred to as A Counselor's Guide; Whitfield et al., 2009).Early Pioneers of Interest inventoriesThis history begins with Jesse Davis (1914) publishing the Student Vocational Self Analysis for all public school 10th graders. Davis systemized an analysis of self- awareness to occupations process. Although Davis was an educator, a principal in the Detroit and Grand Rapids public schools, the majority of the authors to follow were psychologists serving primarily adult and college student clients. In 1917, the first of these psychologists, James Miner, studied whether students' preferences were their own or due to teachers' influence and he then went on to develop interest questions with weighted scores. Brewer's (1942) History of Vocational Guidance described Miner's work extensively and cited his questionnaire on interests as "the forerunner of Strong's later researches" (p. …