Kuder User News - February 24, 2010

Kuder’s Assessments Direct Students to Successful Careers

For high school students, wading through a sea of occupations and career choices can be intimidating and overwhelming. Career assessments are intended to help students discover more about themselves and the world of work, and they go a long way toward helping students define their future education and career plans.

The benefit of utilizing career assessments is best illustrated by those who have taken an assessment, followed a career path in an area suggested by the assessment results, and have had long, successful careers as a result.

The Kuder^® Career Search with Person Match (KCS) assessment is designed to help make a connection between a person’s interests and specific career clusters. Kuder’s Person Match pool matches the user’s assessment results with firsthand accounts from professionals who have had rewarding, successful careers in a similar field.

Interviews with four career professionals featured in Person Match demonstrate the benefit of career assessments. When reflecting upon their career path, these participants recall how assessments helped guide them along their educational and career paths as well as affirmed their interest in a particular area of study.

Astronomer
As an astronomy professor and researcher, this Person Match participant credits the Kuder Preference Record she took in high school with providing the reassurance that her interest in science was valid and worth pursuing. “I was very interested in science in high school, but wasn’t sure what kind of science to pursue,” she said. “Astronomy was one of the two things that I was thinking about; the Kuder assessment confirmed my strong interest in science.”

Speech-Language Pathologist
During her sophomore year in college, this Person Match participant went to a career center to seek out career guidance. “Speech pathology was one of the options which came up on the assessment I took,” she said. After discovering there was a department of speech pathology at the university she was attending, she spoke to the head of the department and began the coursework necessary to graduate with an appropriate degree.

Patrolman/School Resource Officer
This Person Match participant was able to recall the results of a high school career assessment and used it to narrow down the seemingly endless possibilities: “When I was in high school, I filled out this career assessment and it said ‘you like to work outside; you like to work with people; you like to help people.’ So, in college I decided to take the police exam just to see what it was like. A position came open in my hometown, and they hired me!” While the assessment didn’t provide an exact profession or career path in its results, it did lead this person to pursue an occupation that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Physical Therapist
This Person Match participant’s first experience with physical therapy was as a patient due to an injury. Then, a high school interest assessment confirmed her interest in this line of work: “The results showed that I leaned toward the medical field. I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor or a nurse because I didn’t want to work at night or on the weekends. So, during high school I volunteered at the physical therapy clinic on the weekends to learn more about it.”

As the Person Match participants above reveal, good career exploration and planning starts with discovering what you like to do, what you are good at doing, and what is important to you in the workplace. Based on more than 70 years of ongoing research, Kuder’s assessments have helped people for decades to find fulfilling, rewarding work. These cases illustrate the several ways in which the results of assessments can be used — to suggest a specific occupation, prioritize several fields of interest, and strengthen self-concepts that may be used when opportunities present themselves in the future.

For more information about Kuder’s assessments, contact Dr. Donald Zytowski at dzytowski@aol.com, or click here.

Would you or someone you know like to participate in Kuder’s Person Match pool? Contact personmatch@kuder.com.

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