Now...together at last...both in the same document !

The Strong Interest Inventory® (SII) is the most respected and widely used instrument for career exploration / planning in
the world. Moreover, the newly revised SII  is more powerful than ever as its content reflects the way we work today. That
is, the many changes in the workforce, the very nature of the jobs we do, and the mirroring of the U.S. population. In
particular, the folks at CPP (Consulting Psychologists Press) are most proud of the huge sampling size as well as the widest
possible range of demographic, racial, ethnic and socio-economic data gathered so as to ensure the highest level of validity
and reliability for the SII. Simply put, the Strong Interest Inventory® “soldiers-on” with its reputation as being the gold
standard in career development.

At its core level, the SII is based on the idea that individuals are more satisfied and productive when they work in jobs or at
tasks that they find interesting and when they work with people whose interests are similar to their own. To say it in
another way, a person’s interests are compared to thousands of individuals who 1) report being happy in their jobs and 2)
are successful in their jobs.

Again, the Strong Interest Inventory does not examine your abilities and skills; it is an inventory of your interests...hence its
name. Consisting of 291 questions, the SII will ask you to indicate your preference for a wide range of occupations, school
subjects, activities and types of people. It will take about 30-45 minutes to complete and it's all taken and results received
on-line. The result is a person’s highly personalized report which identifies optimum career choices based on interests. It
also includes additional related occupations with concise job descriptions. For example, the results may tell you that your
interests are similar to those of engineers who are very satisfied with their career choice. The results do not tell you what
you should be or whether you have an aptitude for the mathematics involved in this career, i.e. whether you’d be good at
that job. Click below to see a sample of this highly personalized career interest portrait of what you would be electronically
receiving (in the form of a PDF file) - should you decide to make use of our services. On average, these reports average 19
pages. That's 19 pages about you personally.




Please note: the Strong comes in three versions:



                                                                
                                                                
                           
                                                                   





















Prior to the introduction of SII, people's interests in jobs were assessed basically, using four techniques. The earliest of
these techniques was "estimation", which simply involved asking an individual to indicate her or his feelings towards an
activity. Because estimates were not always accurate, individuals often were encouraged to "try-out" activities as another
method for assessing their interests. These try-outs could obviously be quite time-consuming and costly. Next came "rating
scales" and "checklists", but still, these efforts made no attempt to systematically identify people's interests.  By
"systematically identifying people's interests", it is meant that there were no attempts to coordinate questions from one
questionnaire to another - or to see how what patterns of responses (if any) each question evoked. In addition, no attempts
were made to correlate on a grander scale (beyond the individuals themselves) any commonalities between responses and
people. In short, each person's answers became an island unto itself...and worse...the interpretation of that person's
responses depended subjectively upon the personality and/or mood of the person doing the interpreting  on that particular
day. All-in-all, not good.    

Then in 1927, psychologist Edward K. Strong Jr. (1884-1963) arrived on the scene introducing the first published systematic
inventory to help people exiting the military (men) find suitable jobs. That is, with his "Strong Vocational Interest Blank", he
used statistical methods to summarize responses to pools of items representing various activities and occupations. He came
out with a version for women in 1938. For its time, Strong's inventory was "good", but by today's highly sophisticated
research standards, it was still a rather blunt instrument.

A few years after Strong's death in 1963, Dr. David Campbell, then a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota,
undertook a major revision of the Inventory and in 1974, introduced the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. It wasn't long
before the S-CII became very well known in the vocational world. Without question, however, the greatest boost to the
credibility of the Strong came with the thoroughly researched and subsequent introduction of the third and fourth revisions
(1981 and 1985). This all happened with co-author Jo-Ida Hansen, Ph.D. As a highly regarded professor who was also in the
Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Hansen continues to direct the Center for Interest Measurement
Research and the Ph.D. Program in Counseling Psychology at UM.

The most recent revision of the SII (2004), includes all of the best research over the decades of Strong, Campbell and
Hansen as well as the typology of psychologist John L. Holland. The "Holland Codes" were introduced in 1985 and are based
on the theory of vocational choice. At its simplest, this theory proposes that "birds of the same feather flock together." In
other words, people like to be around others who have similar personalities - and (job-wise) people who report being
successful in their jobs. Re-stated, in choosing a career, it means that people choose jobs where they can be both
successful and simultaneously be around other people who are like them in their personalities. The newly revised SII
consists of 291 items, each of which asks you to indicate your preference from five responses (strongly dislike, dislike,
indifferent, like, strongly like).  

Meanwhile, David Campbell has chosen to singularly focus on creative leadership and his Campbell Interest and Skill
Survey® (CISS) is doing quite well. Campbell is the H. Smith Richardson Senior Fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership
(CCL) - which is a nonprofit educational institution founded in 1970 and headquartered in Greensboro, N.C. Among other
accomplishments, he has served as a visiting professor at the University of Utah and Duke University as well as been an
honorary research fellow at the University of London and a distinguished visiting professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Returning to Dr. Edward Strong Jr., upon his on his retirement from Stanford University in 1949 - the university where he
taught for a quarter-century - a testimonial dinner was given for him, and the outpouring of affection and esteem was
memorable. Looking back on the decades and while giving reference to the Interest Inventory which he helped create, Dr.
Strong remarked,

"No one believed you could build scales to measure interests, or that such scales would yield any kind of stable scores. As a
matter of fact, I didn't really believe it myself until I had been working on my test for several years. Each time we got a new
occupational group tested, I fully expected to discover that we couldn't differentiate it on an interest basis, and that the
whole concept of interest measurement would fall apart, "What really convinced me emotionally that we had something was
a personal experience. My son had been an indifferent student in college and had no idea what he wanted to do vocationally.
He took my test and came out with an A on Physician, an occupation he had never considered entering. Well, he went to
medical school, got straight A's throughout, and has been a dedicated and successful physician ever since. I began to think
maybe we had a method that would really help young people find where they belonged."
about the newly revised Strong Interest Inventory®
a brief history of the Strong Interest Inventory® (SII)
®
Finally after all these decades...the newly revised Strong Interest Inventory® and the
continually improved MBTI empowers you to see a complete career development
picture based on a fusion of your interests and personality. Note: as opposed to
something that has merely been cobbled together for the sake of convenience, this is
a genuine newly created third document ...one which has been purposely written to
seamlessly interweave your Strong® and MBTI® results.
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  • standard

  • high school

  • college