Telling Stories of Career Assessment

In the field of career development, there is an acknowledged relationship between career assessment and career counseling. Traditional career assessment and more recent narrative approaches to career counseling are perceived as having an uneasy relationship because of their different philosophical bases. A sustainable future story for the field could be constructed that is guided by the complementarities of both. This article considers this potential complementarity and describes a qualitative Integrative Structured Interview (ISI) Process to construct stories about Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS). Narrative career counseling and the story telling approach are the foundation of a qualitative ISI process based on story crafting questions to demonstrate the complementarity of career assessment and story telling.