Week 3 Post

9/19/12

Last week’s exercises with using the “Holland code”, and discussing the cases of David and Melissa were very interesting to me. When we did the exercise in which we answered the questions about ourselves to determine our own “Holland codes,” I was actually a bit surprised at my results. As we discussed in class, I was assuming that, like most of us in the room, would score extremely high on the social scale and everything else would be relatively low by comparison; that was not the case for me, however. The Social aspect was only ONE of my highest scores; I got a score of five in Social AND Artistic. In addition, I scored threes in both Investigative AND Enterprising; I was very surprised that these two were a) tied, and b) as high as they were. When we discussed our results as a class, I panicked initially because we addressed the fact that someone with a tied high score (or several ties, in my case) would appear to be not very well differentiated, and I thought, “Oh no! But I DO know what I want to do and what I’m good at!” As I thought about it more, though, I realized that my results were probably portraying my wide variety of interests; the task was to circle the items of interest to you, not necessarily the things you were good at. For example, I like singing and playing the piano and drawing pictures, but I’m not good enough at any of these things to make a career out of it. On the other hand, I love interacting with people and helping people in any way I can, and I’m especially good at helping people solve interpersonal problems, so counseling is definitely the way to go in terms of my career. It was also very interesting to examine the cases of Melissa and David, especially David. I enjoyed looking at his respective Holland scores and examining their relationship to his job history.

Another thing we discussed last week was the Minnesota Theory of Work Adjustment (MTWA). It was interesting because the Theory of Work Adjustment completely makes sense to me, but I had never really thought of job satisfaction and satisfactoriness in that way before. I obviously was familiar with the assumption that people have both biological and psychological needs that are associated with job satisfaction (or lack thereof), but I had never related that concept to the idea of work environments having similar requirements, and being related to whether or not an individual was satisfactory at his/her given job. I really think Brown (2012) sums it up nicely when he says, “Workers select jobs because of their perception that the job will satisfy their needs, and workers are selected because of the perceptions that their skills will meet the needs of the workplace” (p. 34). Again, I had never actually made that connection before, but it makes sense to me and I definitely agree with the concept in general.

Brown, D. (2012).  Career Information, Career Counseling, and Career Development.  New York: Pearson Education, Inc.