Career Assessment: Qualitative Approaches

Book Preface

The title of this book, Career assessment: Qualitative approaches, was intentionally chosen by the co-editors to acknowledge career assessment’s longstanding integral role in career counselling.

An aim of this book, as the first compilation on qualitative career assessment, has been to move it away from fragmented depictions as practical activities and techniques that might be used to engage and interest clients. Rather, it has been our intention in editing this book to raise the profile of qualitative career assessment as a form of assessment in its own right and not as an accessory to quantitative assessment or to career counselling. In presenting a coherent body of work on qualitative career assessment, the book demonstrates that it has historical, philosophical, theoretical, and research foundations that ground and unite this form of assessment.

The book is innovative in taking a learning perspective of qualitative career assessment. Learning has featured in the field of career development for over half a century, primarily in some career theories, but it has seldom been integrated with career assessment. Indeed, career development learning may be regarded as a goal of the self-understanding and career exploration that is made possible through qualitative career assessment.

In compiling this body of work, we have also not wanted to shy away from important challenges facing qualitative career assessment in the future. Thus, challenges related to its emerging research base, its complementarity with quantitative career assessment, and its use in diverse contexts have been acknowledged and considered.

The book is structured in five parts. Part 1, Qualitative career assessment: Foundations, overviews the historical, philosophical, theoretical, and research foundations of qualitative career assessment. In addition, learning is introduced as a framework through which to consider qualitative approaches to career assessment. Part 2, Qualitative career assessment: Instruments, collates chapters on a comprehensive range of qualitative career assessment instruments. Moreover, this section is structured according to learning styles evident in the instruments described, specifically, visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic. Part 3, Qualitative career assessment: Using Quantitative Career Assessment Qualitatively, considers the qualitative use of quantitative career assessment, and in doing so the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative career assessment. Part 4, Diverse Contexts, considers qualitative approaches to career assessment in contexts other than able, western, middle class settings. Part 5, Qualitative Career Assessment: Future Directions, reflects on the chapters and considers suggestions for future directions.

In its focus on qualitative career assessment, this book will assume a unique and important position as the only such text to date and will therefore be seminal in the field of career assessment.