Career Directions Inventory

Douglas N. Jackson, Ph.D. © 1986, 2000

Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions a person can make. The Career Directions Inventory (CDI) is designed to facilitate educational and career exploration. It matches an individual's interests with related career and academic paths. The CDI is suitable for a wide spectrum of the population, not only for those who are headed for post-secondary school or a professional career.

Applications

• Career and educational counseling for high school, college and university students.
• Career planning for adults, including mid-life career redirection.
• Valuable for corporate restructuring.

Description

The CDI consists of 100 triads of statements describing job related activities. For each triad, the respondent is asked to mark his/her most preferred and least preferred activity.

Computerized scoring yields comprehensive report with easy to understand profiles, as well as definitions for the Basic Interest Scales, and General Occupational Themes. The "Top Three Job Clusters" section gives detailed explanations of the top three occupational clusters that match the individuals interests, lists specific occupations with corresponding O*Net codes, and lists of career-related books, professional organizations that can provide information and their web sites.

Basic Interest Scales

• Administration
• Art
• Clerical
• Food Service
• Industrial Arts
• Health Service
• Outdoors
• Personal Service
• Sales
• Science & Technology
• Teaching/Social Service
• Writing
• Assertive
• Persuasive
• Systematic

Reliability and Validity

Attention to refinement of the initial item pool produced scales with substantial reliabilities and minimum interscale correlations. The internal consistencies (coefficient alpha) are reported in the manual for all substantive scales, including the basic interest scales, general occupational themes, specialty clusters, and educational/occupational specialty groups. For example, the median test-retest reliability for the seven General Occupational Themes was .90, and their median coefficient alpha was .87. The manual presents extensive data on the validity of the CDI as well.

Mail-in Scoring

The CDI Extended Report includes a basic interest profile, a profile for seven (7) general occupational themes, scores of similarity to 22 broad occupational clusters and narrative summaries of the three (3) most similar clusters, sample occupations and a lengthy profile to similarity to more than 100 educational/occupational groups. Lists of sample occupations are linked to O*Net codes. Materials required for mail-in scoring include the test manual and one machine scorable question and answer document.

Software

Our SigmaSoft CDI for Windows software allows you to administer and score the CDI on your computer. The CDI for Windows software produces three types of reports. The Extended Report is similar to that available from our Mail-in Scoring service. The Basic Report contains all of the profiles found in the Extended Report, but does not provide explanatory text and career information. The Data Report contains the scores found in the Basic Report in a format designed for use by other programs. In addition to the software itself, you will need to purchase enough coupons to pay for each report you wish to produce.

Internet

The Career Directions Inventory is available online through SigmaTesting.Com, our main testing site. SigmaTesting.Com gives the counselor complete control over administration and report handling.

Prices

Click here for detailed pricing information.