The problem with career assessments …
During my job search, I hit on an idea regarding the various assessments and career-matching tools available to us.
Many fields are changing, as far as the actual duties and tasks required from day to day. This is certainly true for my former field of Technical Communication. The whole move from print to online formats, the switch from discrete documents to “structured authoring” where bits and pieces are assembled from a CMS, the advent of user-generated content ala Web 2.0, and so on.
However, the career matches generated by the assessments have not changed. The instruments are still using the same criteria they’ve always used.
TechComm illustrates this pretty well: The assessments still use “creativity” as an indicator that techcomm would be a good fit. But with structured authoring, that’s not nearly as important as the inclination to be hyper-organized, or even more technical aspects like enjoying coding XML and creating databases.
Someone should do a thesis or dissertation on this idea …
