RforC Career Style Inventory
RforC Career Style Inventory
The RforC Career Style Inventory brings together two connected instruments built around a single question. How does a working adult understand and act on their own career orientation. The first instrument, the Career Building Attribute Factors checklist, known as CBA 32, asks a respondent to rate a set of twenty six self development actions on two dimensions, how often each is currently practiced and how much each is desired going forward.
The second instrument, the Career Vocational Preference Inventory, known as CVPI 2442 V5, asks a respondent to agree or disagree with one hundred statements about work, promotion, competition, security, and personal identity. Together the two instruments produce a profile that places a respondent within one of five career styles and points toward specific actions that might close the gap between where a respondent currently stands and where a respondent wants to stand.
This manual sets out the theory behind the instrument, the structure of each component, the administration and scoring procedures, the meaning of each of the five career styles, and the considerations an administrator should keep in mind when using the results with an individual or across a workforce.
II. Theoretical Foundation
The CVPI rests on John Holland's theory of personality and occupational fit. Holland proposed that individuals can be sorted into six broad personality orientations and that each orientation has a matching occupational environment. Satisfaction with a job and the likelihood a person will stay in that job depend on how closely the person's own orientation matches the environment they work in. Holland arranged the six orientations around a hexagon so that orientations placed next to each other share more in common than orientations placed across from each other. A person whose orientation sits far from the demands of their current role experiences the largest mismatch and reports the lowest satisfaction.
The CVPI does not attempt to reproduce Holland's six categories directly. Instead it draws on the same underlying premise, that people differ in stable ways in what they want from work and how they pursue it, and it translates that premise into five career styles that describe how an individual manages the passage of a career inside an organization rather than which occupation they are suited to. The five styles describe a respondent's stance toward advancement, security, expertise, organizational loyalty, and personal autonomy.
III. Structure of the Instrument
A. CBA 32, Career Building Attribute Factors
CBA 32 is a twenty six item self rating checklist. Each item names a concrete action a person might take to build managerial or interpersonal capability, ranging from introducing oneself to unfamiliar colleagues, joining a committee outside one's usual area, taking on added responsibility in another part of the organization, reading outside one's field, writing about one's work, or repairing a strained relationship with a colleague. For each item the respondent records a current rating and a desired rating, which together highlight where a gap exists between present practice and stated ambition.
B. CVPI 2442 V5, Career Vocational Preference Inventory
CVPI 2442 V5 contains one hundred statements. Each statement is answered on a four point scale running from Strongly Agree, scored four, through Agree, scored three, Disagree, scored two, and Strongly Disagree, scored one. The one hundred statements divide into five blocks of twenty statements each, and each block corresponds to one of the five career styles. A respondent must answer every statement before a profile can be produced, since each of the five scale totals depends on a complete set of twenty responses.
