work,Choosing a Vocation(1909). As was noted in Chapter One,
Parsons described three key factors in making career choices: (1) clear
self-understanding, (2) knowledge of occupations, and (3) the ability
to draw relationships between them. He reasoned that if individuals
possess these attributes, not only would they make appropriate
choices for themselves but the production function of society would
be served by promoting greater efficiency in matching persons to
occupations. These three factors are now represented in our CIP the-
ory by the self-knowledge domain, the occupational knowledge
domain, and the decision skills domain; they have marked the paths
for three distinct lines of inquiry: (1) self-knowledge, (2) occupa-
tional knowledge, (3) career decision making.
Self-knowledge:The first line of inquiry relates to helping indi-
viduals acquire self-knowledge through the development of measures
of traits and factors (Patterson & Darley, 1936; Williamson, 1939).
Since the development of earlier instruments such as the Kuder Pref-
erence Record (Kuder, 1946) and the Strong Vocational Interest
Blank (SVIB; Strong, 1943), more sophisticated measures have been
introduced, for example, modern interest inventories such as the
Self-Directed Search (SDS; Holland, Powell, & Fritzsche, 1994),
the Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Consulting Psychologists Press,
1994), human abilities tests such as the Inventory of Work-Related
Abilities (American College Testing, 1998), and values inventories
such as the Life Values Inventory (Crace & Brown, 1996) and the
Values Scale (Super & Nevill, 1985).
Occupational knowledge: A second line of inquiry targeted the
second cornerstone of Parsons’s model—occupational knowledge.
Occupational classification systems were developed to facilitate the
storage and retrieval of information about the nature and character-
istics of occupations. Modern classification systems include Standard
Occupational Classification Manual(U.S. Department of Commerce,
2000), the Dictionary of Holland Occupational Codes(Gottfredson &
Holland, 1996), and the ONET(U.S. Department of Labor and
the National ONET Consortium, 1999).
A COGNITIVE INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH 313