We’re often asked about the Kuder Career Planning System® (KCPS) and what makes it so unique. So we enlisted Dr. JoAnn Harris-Bowlsbey to shed light on the mechanisms behind the KCPS, including the assessments at its core, and how they serve as a springboard for reliable occupation exploration.
Career development and choice theories consistently inform us that the first step in education and career planning should be to learn about yourself – specifically about interests, skills, and work values.
Research indicates that school retention, stability of choice of college major, and job satisfaction are significantly enhanced when individuals are able to align their interests, skills, and/or values with occupations, programs of study, and jobs.
The KCPS offers three valid and reliable career assessments that students and adults can take to learn more about themselves and to make valid linkages between that self-information and education and career choices.
These assessments adhere to the latest (2014) technical standards for reliability, validity, and fairness issued by the Joint Committee on Test Standards and the International Test Commission guidelines.
It is important to align the rubric for self-understanding (of interests and skills) with the rubric for organizing occupations and programs of study (majors) so that students and adults can easily bridge that gap.
In general, secondary schools in the United States use an organizational system for occupations and programs of study called the National Career Clusters® Framework. Many U.S. colleges and universities, however, make use of the Holland classification system, developed and researched by the eminent career choice theorist, Dr. John Holland. The KCPS uses both methods to:
The linkage between these two systems is both easy and valid because the O*NET occupational database provided by the U.S. Department of Labor records a “Holland code” for each of its nearly 1,000 occupations.
The theory and classification system proposed by Holland is based on decades of research in a variety of cultures. There are four basic tenets to this theory, as follows:
Now let’s look at the method of organizing occupations and programs of study developed by Advance CTE. In this approach, the universe of occupations is divided into 16 clusters that represent different industries and occupational groups.
Each cluster is broken down into subdivisions, called career pathways, each of which represents a specialty within the cluster and whose occupations have similar knowledge and skills requirements. There is a total of 79 career pathways, two to seven of which are subcategories of each of the 16 clusters.
Based on the premise that career guidance systems should assist individuals to relate self-information to occupations and educational options, the logic in Kuder systems follows this sequence:
The most widely acclaimed career development theorist, often called the “father of career development,” is Dr. Donald E. Super. Among his many accomplishments, he developed the Work Values Inventory. The current revised version of this inventory is the third of the assessments administered in the Kuder system. This assessment measures the level of importance, ranging from “not important at all” to “crucial” of each of 12 work-related values. The results are then displayed in rank order.
Based on the user’s rating of these values, the occupational database is scanned to present the 50 best-matching occupations for further exploration and consideration. Data to support the linkage of values and occupations is derived primarily from the U.S. Department of Labor O*NET database.
One of the most important displays in the KCPS is the one in which all occupations that have been identified by the results of the interest assessment (KCIA), the skills confidence assessment (KSCA), and the work values inventory (SWVI-r) are merged into one list.
The assessment(s) that suggested a specific occupation title are check-marked. Occupations suggested by all three assessments are listed first, then those suggested by two of the three assessments, and finally those suggested only by one assessment.
Users should begin their detailed exploration by learning as much as possible about those that are identified by two or three of the assessments.
