Integrative structured interview process

INTRODUCTION The history of career assessment and the dominant role of quantitative career assessment in that history have been described in several chapters of this book. Integral to this discussion of career assessment are two potentially conflicting perspectives. The one is evident in the prevailing emphasis on quantitative career assessment that is philosophically grounded in a logical positivist approach that emphasises objectivity and linear cause/effect processes in measurement. The other perspective is the increasing focus on constructivist and social-constructionist approaches that emphasise narrative forms of subjective assessment (e.g., Amundson, 2009; Savickas et al., 2009). The latter movement reflects the recognition that the world of work is far more complex in the present century than it was at the start of the last century. Individual careers must now develop within a context of rapid and sustained change and an ever expanding global market. These differing perspectives have led to an ongoing debate as to the adequacy of quantitative career assessment approaches with an increasingly diverse clientele and an increasingly fluid and complex work world (e.g., Savickas, 1993). The debate is not new. In the middle of the last century, Donald Super (1954) called for career practitioners to “use both methods, sometimes emphasizing one, sometimes the other” (p. 16). It is a call that has largely been unheeded, leading to what Watson and McMahon (2014) describe as “an unhelpful divide” (p. 631)