Manage for Career Development with the Strong Interest Inventory

Question 1: What's your Myers-Briggs type? (I'm ENTP).

Question 2: How have you used this information to further your career? What specific actions have you taken based on your knowledge of your MBTI type?

... ??

I'm sure 99% of you easily answered question 1... I've never met anybody who isn't a career development professional who could answer question 2 (which is such a shame because the MBTI is so so valuable!!)

Same for the Clifton Strengths Finder: a lot of you can probably tell me what your strengths are... almost none of you can tell me what actions you've taken to develop your career in light of this information (probably more than the MBTI though, to be fair to the CSF).

The obvious problem is that Step 1 is acquiring information, Step 2 is making a plan for using the information, Step 3 is implementing the plan. Your company paid a lot of money to give you Step 1, but probably nobody gave you any direction about Step 2, so you never made it to Step 3.

This is one of a hundred million reasons why the Strong Interest Inventory is superior in every way as a career development tool to the MBTI and the CSF: only credentialed career development professionals can administer it, so Step 2 never gets left out. Step 3 is still up to you ??

Rather than waste time writing out all the other reasons the Strong Interest Inventory is better, here's a prompt for you to feed to your favorite LLM:

"Give me a bulleted list of 10 reasons why a reasonable person would conclude that the Strong Interest Inventory is the greatest career assessment of all-time, then produce a second list with 10 reasons for why it is superior as a career assessment to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Clifton Strengths Finder assessments in particular."

Why I love the Strong Interest Inventory

I love everything about the Strong Interest Inventory, but my absolute favorite is Section 3: the Occupational Scales. Here's my Top 10 Strong Occupations from when I last took it in 2016:

The next 3 pages of results show 120 other occupations, and how similar my pattern of item responses are to groups of people who are very happy and successful in those careers. Here's what the first page of that looks like:

I love the Occupational Scales because they are 100% empirical. We don't know precisely why people who are happy and successful as career counselors, or firefighters, or accountants, or anything else, tend to answer the way they do on the particular items that distinguish them, but that's the best part! We don't need to know why! We don't even have to care why! It's just a fact that these patterns of responses distinguish people who are happy and successful in these careers, and if you go work with people in your top Strong Occupations, you'll probably like them, you'll find them easy to get along with, you'll enjoy the work itself, and you'll probably be successful at it.

How I use the Strong Interest Inventory

To me, the SII is an invaluable management tool. My strategy as a manager is to manage for career development. Meaning, I will do everything in my power to help you reach your highest career potential in terms of promotions, pay, and prestige. I want you to feel like you're making your way to the position of your dreams every day when you come to work, even if it's with another team or another company.

This last part is essential for trust.

According to Stanley Strong's (son of Strong Interest Inventory namesake E. K. Strong Jr.) seminal 1968 literature review, "Counseling as an Interpersonal Influence Process,"

A communicator's perceived trustworthiness is a function of (a) their reputation for honesty, (b) their social role, such as physician, (c) their sincerity and openness, and (d) their perceived lack of motivation for personal gain. [emphasis added]

By far the most powerful of these four is perceived lack of motivation for personal gain.

If "developing my career" means staying in the same role as long as you can keep me, we're stuck in a pretty small box here. Do you really think staying in this role indefinitely, or growing on this particular ladder indefinitely is the optimal career move for me? Maybe it is, maybe you're right! But how can we know for sure if we haven't explored my interests abilities, and values yet?

The career landscape is like the multiverse in the Marvel movies: every combination of job characteristics exists out there somewhere. If this job isn't AMAZING, and it can't be changed to make it AMAZING, then the only way I'm going to have an AMAZING job is if I leave this role or team and explore elsewhere. If that's off the table, then you're just blowing smoke when you say you want to develop my career.

Instead, I like to start my time with new employees by:

1. Giving you the Strong Interest Inventory, interpreting it for you and teaching you something new about yourself,
2. Telling you I'm going to arrange your work tasks such that you'll be engaging with your interests, abilities, and values every day in your work,
3. Giving you a special project I know you'll love and at which you'll succeed because it matches your profile, so I can make your case for promotion, and
4. Telling you if you think this job isn't ultimately where you want to land, we'll make sure your project will be a major boost to your resume on your way to your dream job (which we can ballpark very well with the SII).

If I do that, you will probably work as hard as you can to crush for however long I have you. And if I'm the manager that helped you get to your dream career, even though it meant losing you from my team, you'll love and appreciate that forever. It's the right way to treat people if you can. And since businesses are made of people and relationships, if I work hard to help you become the strongest possible person, this gives us the strongest possible relationship, which enhances my personal "business" to the greatest possible degree. I had 16 different managers at Tesla in 6 years. That's an average of 4.5 months each. To give up the opportunity to change someone's life for the better forever, for the sake of squeezing a little more time out of them now, doesn't make sense to me. And I don't see why this analysis should change if we're talking about 5 years instead of 5 months.

Case Example:

When I was managing the Commercial Energy Field Service Training Team (they train the people who go out and fix the Superchargers, Megapacks, and commercial solar arrays when they break), my top trainer was Allen Hughes . Not only was Allen an excellent trainer, he was an absolute workhorse and an attitude superstar: a leader in every way.

Shortly before I took over that team, Allen had expressed to me that he didn't think he was realizing his full potential in the role, and was looking elsewhere, both inside and outside the company. Immediately after becoming his manager I gave him the Strong Interest Inventory.

His results showed that he was absolutely correct. He scored above 40 on everything related to teaching and training, which tells me he should like it pretty well, enjoy it, and be good at it, which he was. But he also had 14 other careers on which he scored as high or higher than his highest training-related career, almost every one of them pays significantly more, and he had all the relevant skills, education, and experience to be an excellent hire for any of them. His top two were Engineer and Military Officer... Allen is an electrical engineer who was an officer in the Navy.

As much as I hated the idea of losing Allen, I could immediately see it was a foregone conclusion. To encourage him to stay would be to encourage him to act against his own best interests. And as I mentioned in my TESLA FOREVER article, I am forever grateful to the Senior Managers who managed me with an open hand, who prioritized caring about me as a person more than an employee. Not to do the same for Allen would have been some pretty outlandish hypocrisy.

For the rest of the time I managed him, Allen regularly sent me reqs for jobs in which he was interested, and I gave him my opinion on whether they were a good fit for him. He eventually did leave, and is now the Manager of Thermal Systems Maintenance at Stanford University.

Allen absolutely loves his awesome job, and to this day, he is a good friend. Every time I'm in the Bay Area we hang out, and he credits me with helping him get to his dream job. Isn't that better than being a pretty good manager he had for a few months?

For Job Seekers:

As I said above, the career landscape is the multiverse. To me, trying to navigate this infinitely-huge world and find what you're looking for without the Strong Interest Inventory seems borderline impossible. How can you find a needle in a haystack if you don't even know it's a needle you're looking for?

To take it, you need to get with a career development professional. If you still have health insurance and are desperate to find a job quickly without sacrificing your standards, you should schedule an appointment with a psychologist who specializes in career development immediately. Whatever the copay is, it will be the best investment you can possibly make for your career right now.