Build Your Strong Career Path

At Ivy Options, we offer several tools to help our students identify their optimal career paths. One such tool is the Strong Interest Inventory, an online career interest assessment. In this article, we will discuss how Strong can help you identify career preferences and pick a university major.

About Strong

The Strong Interest Inventory was developed by the Myers-Briggs Company, a pioneer in personality research. This assessment consists of over 300 questions, asking you about activities that you like and work settings that you prefer. For example, do you enjoy writing essays? How about playing sports? Do you like talking to your peers during breaks? Are you a team player? After you complete numerous questions, including some that relate more directly to certain fields and industries, you receive a fourteen-page report and an hour-long session with one of our Strong Inventory-trained career counselors, which launches an in-depth discussion about careers.

What Personality Type Are You?

The Strong Profile report consists of two parts: first, it summarizes your responses to describe your work personality. Strong identifies six general interest themes or types:

• Realistic – the doers of this world, people who prefer physical activity or interaction with the physical world and physical objects. These types of people might love sports or outdoor activities, trouble-shooting and repairing a rocket engine, or would enjoy working on DIY projects.

• Artistic – the creatives who love producing art (whether music, painting, or writing) or who appreciate art (e.g. readers, film critics, museum-goers).

• Investigative – the thinkers who love solving problems through math, science, or logical thinking.

• Social – the helpers who enjoy their work most when it enables them to support people and have a direct positive impact – think of a teacher who helps through personal interactions, not a scientist who might also have a huge positive impact on people, but in an indirect way.

• Enterprising – the persuaders who are similar to helpers in their love of interacting with people, but are different in their motivation. Enterprising personalities are not driven by wanting to help a cause; rather, they enjoy seeing that they can influence, persuade, or lead others.

• Conventional – the organizers who excel at creating structured systems and processes and enjoy accounting, data analysis, or working with spreadsheets.

The majority of people score higher on two or three of these themes. Take a look at an example below.

Let’s say this student, Sarah, came to the session saying that her role model and inspiration is Elon Musk. The first assumption might be that Sarah wants to become an engineer or innovator. However, a quick look at this graph shows that engineering might not be the best option. This student appreciates structured and organized processes (Conventional) and also enjoys persuading others (Enterprising), which means she will probably enjoy working in the business field as opposed to science (low Investigative). Given that she scores high on Realistic, Sarah might indeed enjoy working with physical/mechanical products such as cars or spaceships as opposed to, let's say, selling insurance. Scoring low on the Artistic scale, however, suggests that she might not be strong at innovating, but would rather use her superpowers, which are organizing processes or working with data (Conventional) and persuading others (Enterprising).

While these are all rough suggestions, the test goes into a more detailed analysis of each of those themes and particular interests within them in the next few pages, so students and counselors have a much better idea of what precisely is hidden behind these generalized themes.

Will You Be Happy Doing Your Job?

The second part of the Strong Profile Report is where the magic happens. The report compares your responses to the 300+ questions to the responses of a sample of people who represent 130 occupations – all of these individuals claimed that they have been doing their jobs for more than three years and that they loved what they were doing. Based on that comparison, you get a list of ten occupations that might be a good fit for you. This list, however, is not prescriptive. Quite the opposite – it’s just another data set for us to discuss and analyze. For instance, let’s look at Mark’s list below.

Mark’s top ten Strong occupations are:

1. Librarian

2. Photographer

3. Reporter

4. Graphic Designer

5. Editor

6. Translator

7. Art teacher

8. Counselor

9. Author

10. Entertainment manager

To start, we’re looking for general patterns. Mark is into creative jobs. He also would prefer to work alone, not as part of a team. Some of these jobs are strong in Social or Realistic, both of which mean that Mark would like to see the results of his work either through producing something tangible or visible (e.g., photos, designs, pieces of writing) or by performing a job where he’d work directly with people (e.g., reporter, teacher, entertainment manager).

Then we move on to analyzing each item on the list one by one through three lenses: industry, function, and skillset. Let’s look at the Librarian. First we take an industry – it could be publishing, print, or digital media. Then we’ll ask Mark if he thinks he’d enjoy working in, let’s say, a book publishing company, or if he’d like to launch a website like Goodreads or join the team at Audible (regardless of the role he’ll take there).

Then we look at the Librarian as a function – what do librarians do on a day-to-day basis? They organize books and work directly with customers. If indeed Mark is keen on organizing, maybe he doesn’t need to work in the book publishing industry, but rather work for Spotify and help them organize their playlists and develop structured music libraries through collaboration with artists and their managers.

Finally, let’s zoom in more and look at the skills that make a good librarian – one of them is attention to detail. If Mark indeed is strong at that (and he might not be – it’s our hypothesis), then he might enjoy jobs that require a lot of concentration and meticulous work.

It’s All About Self-Awareness

The Strong Interest Inventory is just a tool – and a great one – that gives us a framework to discuss students’ preferences. Regardless of whether you take the assessment or not, apply your curiosity and dig deeper. Look for general themes and patterns and then analyze each job you’ve ever considered in terms of an industry, a function, or a set of skills. Stay open-minded and creative – you might even find a perfect career path that you’ve never considered before.