in our view an important aspect of this process, particularly for
those evidencing flat interest profiles or feeling stifled by a con-
stricted range of possibilities, is to promote the broadest possible
array of occupational options by helping clients to identify and
revisit those career paths that they might have already eliminated
on the basis of faulty self-efficacy percepts or outcome expectations.
We have developed two counseling strategies for this purpose
(Brown & Lent, 1996). These strategies require little change in
how most counselors, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, go
about career counseling because they both represent slight modifi-
cations of commonly employed methods.
The first strategy, which employs standardized aptitude, need-
value, and interest test data, is derived from well-studied assump-
tions that occupations generated from need-value and aptitude data
represent options that (1) clients will find satisfying (because they
correspond with clients’ preferences for work conditions and rein-
forcers), and (2) in which clients will likely perform satisfactorily
(because of their correspondence with clients’ abilities) (Dawis &
Lofquist, 1984). We compare and target for further discussion occu-
pational possibilities that are suggested on the basis of aptitude and
need-value data but that are not generated by interest data.
To illustrate, we used this strategy with a thirty-five-year-old
woman who sought help in making a career change because of dis-
satisfaction with her job as a picture editor with a major publisher.
From a social cognitive perspective, her testing results were quite
dramatic. Her aptitudes and needs data corresponded well with col-
lege teaching in a variety of socially oriented fields such as sociol-
ogy, psychology, and counseling. However, she had responded to
the “interest” measure with a large percentage of indifferent re-
sponses and, consequently, had a very flat and undifferentiated
interest profile.
When these discrepancies between her aptitudes and needs, on
the one hand, and her interests, on the other, were discussed with
her, she reported that she had earlier considered such occupational
possibilities but had failed to consider them seriously because she
288 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT