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The Strong Interest Inventory® assessment is one of the world’s most widely respected and frequently used career planning tools. It has helped both academic and business organizations develop the brightest talent and has guided thousands of individuals—from high school and college students to mid-career workers seeking a change—in their search for a rich and fulfilling career.

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Taking The Strong Interest Inventory

The Strong Interest Inventory is a self-assessment instrument used by career development professionals to help high school and university students, as well as adults, discover their interests.

 

The Strong Interest Inventory contains 291 items that ask users about their preferences in regard to occupations, subject areas, activities, leisure activities, people and characteristics. It takes between 35 and 40 minutes to complete.

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Getting Your Results

Your results will come in the form of a report. Accredited staff at Productive Sales and Marketing will  go over it with you in order to make sure you understand it. We will inform you that even though the report contains a list of occupations that might be suitable for you based on your answers, that doesn't necessarily mean they are. You should always thoroughly explore any occupation you are considering.

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Your report will be presented in six sections as follows:

• General Occupational Themes (GOT): General Occupational Themes are six broad areas that represent the personality types that were defined by John Holland, a psychologist. Holland believed that all people fall into one or more of six types based on their interests and approaches to life situations: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional. He believed that work environments could also be categorized into these six types. Your scores are compared to the average scores for your gender to determine your interest levels for each of the six types, referred to as themes on the report. You are then presented with your Holland Code, which indicates your highest themes. The report will also include information about the interests, work activities, potential skills, and values associated with each theme.

• Basic Interest Scales (BIS): This section of the report tells you what your top interests are, based on the work and leisure activities, projects and course work that you found most motivating and rewarding. These interests are categorized under the General Occupational Themes as described in the previous section.

• Occupational Scales (OS): To get the results for this section, your interests are compared to the interests of people of the same gender working in 122 occupations. A list of occupations is then generated. It contains those occupations in which people whose interests most closely match yours work.

• Personal Styles Scales (PSS): This section tells you what your preferences are regarding work style, learning environment, leadership style, risk taking and team orientation. It is helpful to have this information as you begin to research occupations that you might want to pursue.

• Profile Summary: This section simply provides you with a graphic representation of your results. You can consult this as you move forward through the career planning process.

• Response Summary: Summarizes your responses by category.

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Explore the Strong Model

For providing a theoretical structure to the Strong, in 1974 John Holland’s psychology-based codes were incorporated into the assessment. Holland’s theory is based on four main assumptions:

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As shown above, Holland’s theory organizes the six Themes by placing them at the six points of a hexagon with those presumed to be the most closely related located adjacent to each other and those most dissimilar located across the hexagon from each other. The order in which they fall around the hexagon is frequently called the R-I-A-S-E-C order. The Strong is the only empirically derived RIASEC assessment.

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