Career counseling intervention using Holland's personality types for high school dropouts

When high school dropouts learn that David Karp, the founder of Tumblr who is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars after selling his business for $1.1 billion (O’Brien, 2014), they will become uniquely inspired to pursue alternative career paths, and to realize their dreams regardless of their backgrounds or any mistakes they might have made in the past. Being a high school drop out does not resign a person to a life of low wage earnings or disempowerment. With targeted career counseling interventions, each and every high school student or dropout can learn how to access and leverage their resources, skills, and strengths. Using Holland’s theory of personality types, a proposed career counseling intervention program will help all high school students, including those who have already dropped out. The goal of the career counseling program is to help all students maximize their potential and pursue a purposeful and goal-driven career path.
Population Characteristics
High school students and high school dropouts are an incredibly diverse cohort in the United States, coming from a multitude of ethnic, cultural, religious, and health status backgrounds. It is relatively easy to define high school students by enrollment figures, and likewise, to define high school dropouts as a young person who had previously been enrolled in high school but who is no longer. However, in one report, researchers found that may be harder to measure the rates of high school dropouts because “fewer students were graduating from high school in the United States than is being reported by school districts, states, and the National Center for Education Statistics,” (Standard, 2003, p. 217). High school students at risk for dropping out include “those with low grade point averages, those who had been suspended, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds,” (Suh, Suh, & Houston, 2007, p. 196). However, struggling in school is not the only reason why students drop out. Economic hardships at home, a lack of social support networks in the community or at school, and discrimination in school might be linked to dropout risk. Dropout risk is higher for African American and Latino students than for white students, with clear implications for policy and program development (Standard, 2003). Given the diversity of the high school and high school dropout population, it is categorically impossible to make any generalizations, even based on age. The proposed program can and should be adapted to suit the needs of individual high schools and their respective communities.
Implications for planning a career counseling program include taking into account the wide range of issues involved in career planning for young people. An assessment of local, state, and national level career statistics can be found on the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Organizing the program will require collaboration with local small and large business, social service organizations, and grant money from the public sector and non-profit organizations. The proposed program is designed to leverage existing resources, particularly in the area of entrepreneurship. To organize this program, it will also be necessary to solicit support from public speakers and inspirational speakers who can help students to design their own personal and professional map.
Communicating the program will entail developing strategic relationships with the school boards, as well as school administrators. Additionally, communication will involve creating a strong online and social media presence, with which to attract funding and key alliances with community and private sector organizations. Communications with parents will also be necessary, and of course, ongoing communications with the students—the primary stakeholders in the program—will require the use of whatever media is best suited for the target audience. Finally, communicating the principles of the career counseling program depends on working with the media. A strong media relations campaign will be helpful in promoting the goals of the career counseling initiative.
Managing the implementation and administration of the program for the target population will require a dedicated team consisting of paid professionals as well as volunteers. Professionals from various fields, including psychology and business administration will be instrumental in ensuring the success of the program. Also, we would need to develop a budget for short-term and long-term cost accounting. The budget would remain flexible, as costs will be variable. Financial assistance will be available through state and federal initiatives for entrepreneurship, and corresponding local initiatives and opportunities. Local, state, and federal organizations might want to be associated with our program for their own brand identity, facilitating funding for the career counseling initiative. Because a large portion of the target population is underserved critically and/or minority communities, funding will inevitably come from programs especially designed to invest in young black or Hispanic entrepreneurs, or students from different ethnic backgrounds.
Theoretical Approach
Holland’s theory of personality types is widely used in the fields of career counseling, career planning, and human resources development. Some research also applies Holland’s theory to the arena of high school guidance and career counseling (Cohen, 2017). Holland proposed six primary personality types, and developed a proven inventory test to assess those types. The types are linked with preferences for specific work environments, and not just proficiencies on certain tasks. Holland’s six core personality types include realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional.
The underlying principle of Holland’s personality types as they apply to career development is that “people whose personality types correspond to their work environments would be satisfied and thrive in the work environment,” (Cohen, 2017, p. v). Holland’s theory of personality types can be easily integrated with other career planning and professional development theories and methods of self-assessment including the Strong Interest Inventory (SII). The Strong Interest Inventory directly assesses student career interests, and can be extended to refer to student overall interests evidenced by hobbies, sports, and other extracurricular activities. Therefore, it is important to integrate Holland’s theory of personality types into a comprehensive high school counseling program.
Interventions
Career interventions, including specific services, activities, techniques, and assessments, can be adapted for use within the target population of high school students and high school dropouts. As Feller (2003) points out, the career counselor plays a major role in designing and implementing the specific career interventions for high school students, from assessment methods to activities that lead to job placement and career mapping. Starting with the essential service of career or guidance counseling, the high school career counselor meets with students, teachers, and parents regularly for the most thorough ongoing evaluations. Through regular meetings, the career counselor is in a better position to assess each student individually rather than rely on assumptions and biases. The ways each high school student or high school dropout will self-present in initial meetings may not be indicative of the individual’s goals, potential, or interests. Therefore, the longer the career counseling services is provided, the more efficacious it will be. Meetings will also coincide with interactions with parents and teachers, who will provide additional information about the student that the student may not have realized is important for self-disclosure. For example, the student might not realize that the fact they spend hours every day watching or interacting with insects is actually important for determining what their career goals might be. Parents and educators will also offer insight into personality types, because self-assessments can have limited value. I would want to use a number of tools, inventories, and assessments, starting with Holland’s personality types. The Holland inventory yields a personality code, blending traits from different areas like enterprising and social. An example of the Holland personality inventory is available online (https://www.careerkey.org/choose-a-career/hollands-theory-of-career-choice.html#.WhniabQ-cWo). The results of the inventory yield what Holland refers to as codes. These codes can be used to guide students towards career choices that reflect their personality and predilections for certain organizational structures and environments.
In addition to the Holland inventory, I would also implement the Myers-Briggs personality inventory and the Strong Interest Inventory as recommended by Cohen (2017). I am choosing these assessments because the career counseling intervention is designed to align with student personality traits and interests, be student-centered, and reduce biases and assumptions about this population. These assessments will also be accompanied by fun exercises and homework activities that encourage students and dropouts alike to cultivate the habit of self-assessment. Through self-assessment, students and all young people, regardless of their background or socio-economic status, can come to a realization about what their preferences are not just for the job sector, but for the work environment too. Through self-assessment activities and related exercises, students will also cultivate the confidence to value their own strengths and skills rather than presuming that success in their limited array of high school classes is the only marker of their value in their community or the economy at large.
After the assessment stage, or during ongoing personality and placement assessments, this program will also involve field exercises designed for students and high school dropouts. In conjunction with local businesses, the career counselor will help place all students and dropouts into internship or paid positions according to the results of their personality inventories and their career preferences. Working in the real life scenario will help the students understand what the daily tasks of the job are, the workplace culture, and other factors that are difficult to ascertain based on their images or beliefs about that career path. For high school students, the job placement program will afford them school credits, too.
In addition to temporary job placement programs, shadowing and mentoring opportunities will be integrated into this program for career development. The shadowing and mentoring components of this program will integrate well with the Holland personality theory because the mentors will either reflect the students’s personality predilections or not, thereby showing how different people thrive in different work settings. For this reason, Nicholas, Chae, Hussain, et al (2015) recommend for high school students “participation in skills competition, co-operative education, internships, job shadowing, and mentoring” (p. 1). Shadowing offers the high school students and high school dropouts the chance to see what it is really like to work in a certain sector or for a specific company. Mentoring provides the means by which students become used to being supported by adults, rather than viewing adults in positions of authority as being antagonists. Also, the mentoring program will help educate all high school students and high school dropouts about alternative workplace environments. The workplace environments and cultures of tech companies, for example, will be completely different from student assumptions about traditional hierarchical organizations.
The proposed program will also be important to provide students with personalized counseling related to their family backgrounds and the messages they receive from their parents. Many students will have a self-concept and an outlook on their career options that is constrained by their parents’ beliefs, or the example set by their parents. To help students overcome the limitations placed upon them, conscious or not, the school career counselor will encourage the students to dream big. Exercises related to envisioning their dreams will include encouraging students adept at arts or athletics to recognize legitimate career paths in these fields. For the goals of mitigating student social and psychological schemas, the proposed career counseling intervention will include exposure to positive role models.
Dreaming big will require the introduction of role models in the form of public speakers, but also volunteers who are willing to mentor the students. At-risk students will be particularly selected for this component of the career development program, in order to show students they could become the next David Karp if only they learn how to leverage their resources. Other concrete tools that will be provided to the students during the intervention will be how to seek for and receive grant money for starting their own business, how to use online job search websites, and how to write effective cover letters and resumes. Similarly, the career counselor will coach students on how to do well in interviews. The basic skills will be taught in formal and informal ways, improving the students’ written and oral communications skills. Of course, students participating in entrepreneurial development programs will also receive instruction on how to write a business plan.
One of the primary components of the career counseling intervention for all high school students, but especially the high school dropouts, will be entrepreneur training. Research substantiates evidence that entrepreneur training works. On study showed, for example, that “Junior Achievement Company Program (JACP) participation increases the long-term probability of starting a firm as well as entrepreneurial incomes,” (Elert, Andersson & Wennberg, 2015, p. 209). A similar entrepreneur training program will be developed and offered especially to the students and dropouts who scored high on the Holland personality code of enterprising. Enterprising individuals will be natural risk takers and visionaries who may have ideas for starting a business, but they never believed themselves capable of manifesting their dreams. Students who do not become inspired to follow a traditional career path but who score higher on other dimensions of the Holland personality test, such as those who score high on artistic measures, will also be offered a range of opportunities and programs such as placement in arts schools. On the other hand, a lot of high school students and high school dropouts may score high on the conventional code on Holland’s personality test. These students will be given more traditional career counseling options, such as options for vocational training. High school dropouts should be made aware of the fact that the high school diploma itself is not a goal; that their overarching goals might not depend on that degree. One study in China showed that counseling students who were interested in a vocational path actually led those students to drop out because of the prevalence of moderately lucrative unskilled jobs in their area (Loyalka, Liu, Song, et al 2013). Even in a post-industrial, post-manufacturing economy, there are a range of vocational options for all students and for dropouts too.
As Feller (2003) points out, one of the roles of the career counselor in a high school is to work with administrators to change the curriculum to better suit the needs of the current generation of students. Career counselors can help administrators and policymakers to embed entrepreneurial courses into the official curriculum, for example, The career counselor also seeks methods of pairing students with appropriate mentors, and matching students with sources of funding for their entrepreneurial or creative ideas. For example, a student who writes screenplays will be directed to grant money for young screenwriters.
To evaluate the efficacy of the program, it will be helpful to rely on longitudinal data. Longitudinal data will take into account student self-assessments of their job satisfaction, as well as measures like income. Measuring the success of a student start-up firm is not an accurate means of assessment. One reason for this is that not all start-ups succeed, and failure in business is a valuable lesson. Students will receive ongoing coaching from their mentors to help them navigate the ups and downs of a competitive environment. In fact, Elert, Andersson & Wennberg (2015) found that even though entrepreneurial training for high school students and high school dropouts did lead to higher rates of entrepreneurial activities, their success was not predictive of the firm’s success. In addition to the longitudinal tests, the career counselor can also offer regular qualitative and quantitative surveys designed to assess student impressions of the programs. Furthermore, the assessments can include interviews with parents, teachers, and mentors.
Advocacy
Advocacy is one of the most important components of the proposed career counseling program. There are many ways the career counselor advocates for students, from working with administrators to change the curriculum, to helping students find out about and utilize funding from grants. High school dropouts whose career aspirations require a high school diploma will be encouraged to return to school, or offered alternatives to fulfilling their dreams such as starting their own company. The goal of this career counseling program is to stimulate creative thinking among all the high school students and the high school dropouts, many of whom have not yet been exposed to the options available to them for funding their dreams. Advocacy entails helping all students leverage their existing social connections, communities, and resources available to help minority students.
To be an effective advocate for the students, it is important for the career counselor to look beyond stereotypes, biases, and assumptions about high school dropouts in particular. The goal of the proposed intervention and career counseling program is to expand the range of opportunities available for students, to help them think strategically but also creatively about their career prospects and planning, and to provide them with institutional supports. Advocacy encompasses the latter, fixing students with the institutional supports they will come to rely on throughout their careers. As the example of David Karp shows, a high school dropout can start a billion-dollar tech company through dedication and self-motivated learning, but also through clever leverage of social connections and social networks. Not all high school dropouts are destined for vocational careers; many have the potential to shine as entrepreneurs or creative personnel but have not yet been exposed to these types of opportunities. Whereas Karp was born into a privileged family, many high school dropouts in this program will not have had the same opportunities. This program will help all students unearth a wealth of options available to them, both in the private and the public sector.
Advocating for students is therefore partly a matter of providing psychological career counseling based on the theory of Holland’s personality types, and partly a matter of interfacing student personality with the labor market. Integrating student personality with labor market realities will help students develop realistic but realizable career maps. As Feller (2003) points out, career counselors at the high school level play a unique role in alerting students of educational options in and outside of their current school. A student who demonstrates aptitude and interest for a career in human resources might be guided towards psychology courses, but a student whose interest is in professional dancing might need to learn about arts schools in the community. Extracurricular programs will also be part of the ways the career counselors advocate for students and their unique needs.
As student advocates, career counselors also work regularly with educators, administrators, and educational policymakers. Feller (2003) notes that career counselors participate in curricular development because they see how courses and school programs lead directly towards pragmatic paths for high school students. Even high school dropouts benefit from student advocacy because of the ways career counselors alert them of occupational opportunities immediately available in the community as internships or entry-level positions.
Students from diverse backgrounds also need powerful career counselor advocates who help them access funding, grants, and career opportunities in their native languages, or within their ethnic communities. Many students will learn through this program about opportunities in their communities, leading either to entrepreneurial activities or to philanthropic work. Even the faith-based organizations in communities might offer students and high school dropouts opportunities for career development or live/work abroad programs. Providing assistance to high school students and high school dropouts often requires creative management of resources for long-term networking and social embeddedness. When high school dropouts realize that their social networks are their greatest assets, they start to reframe their self-concept and develop the confidence to succeed regardless of their educational history.
Discussion Questions
1. The trend in the labor market has been towards downsizing vocational tracts. All across the country, unskilled positions and other vocational jobs that require little formal education have been gradually eliminated due to increased automation. The same thing happened several generations ago, leading to periods in which the poor and working poor have suffered with high rates of unemployment. This being the case, how can career counselors help high school students and high school dropouts?

Students realize that we are in a post-industrial, post-manufacturing economy. Stalwart firms like FedEx and UPS have been pushing for tax cuts in the name of job creation, while automating everything possible (“FedEx & UPS: Pushing Tax Cuts In the Name of Job Creation, While Automating Everything Possible,” 2017). Experimenting with drones, artificial intelligence, and driverless vehicles, these companies have indeed eliminated some of the jobs that have been typically filled by low skilled or unskilled workers.
While companies like FedEx and UPS are eliminating some of these positions, these are traditionally jobs reserved for the underclass. Given the marginalization of labor unions in the United States, unskilled labor does not lead to pathways of success. On the other hand, a recent article published in The Economist shows how artificial intelligence and new forms of automation are directly creating new kinds of work (“Artificial intelligence will create new kinds of work,” 2017). Therefore this trend should be viewed as a positive and not a negative. Tied in with the example of David Karp, high school dropouts need to stop viewing their options for career development in limited ways. Career counselors who also harbor stereotypes and biases surrounding options for high school dropouts also need to cultivate awareness of how to overcome these limitations to help students understand how the labor market is changing, perhaps for the better.
What automation is doing is creating new opportunities, both for permanent and freelance positions. Students who score high on Holland types for conventionality might not appreciate the allure of the freelance positions, but those who score low on this domain will. All high school students and high school dropouts can realize their potential in the new economy by cultivating content development skills and technological skills they can later leverage in the business world. Whether they teach themselves how to code, or find a way to fund a course in coding at a local college, high school dropouts do not need to limit themselves to unskilled work. A high school diploma is no guarantee of career success. High school students and high school dropouts need to set the bar higher for themselves.

2. Elert, Andersson & Wennberg (2015) found that an entrepreneurial training program for high school students did not necessarily ensure firm survival. How can the career counselor provide ongoing support for young entrepreneurs?

This is a major issue because career counselors are going to be there for the high school student or dropout for a limited time only. Once the program has been completed, students may feel they are left to their own devices. There are two ways to mitigate this problem. One is that the proposed program intervention is specifically designed to provide students not with one-time tools, but with tools they can take with them. Students will receive access to electronic databases, real world connections to business owners and community leaders who will support them on their early career development or entrepreneurial paths, and the means by which to seek and apply for grant money to achieve their goals. Granted, high school students and high school dropouts are young, and have a range of interests besides their career including dating and socializing, as well as hobbies. Because of their limited attention spans, many high school students and high school dropouts might forget much of what they learned during the self-assessment and advocacy components of this career development program.
Therefore, the second way to mitigate the problem of long-term support is through strategic alliances with community organizations. As discussed earlier in this report, alliances with community groups and organizations allow the high school student or high school dropout to transfer trust. Through the principle of embededdness, the career counselor and the community organization—or even the private business sector—have similar goals in helping the young people in that community stay out of trouble, maximize potential, and contribute to the community as an entrepreneur, artist, or member of an esteemed organization. When possible, the extended social networks for each student will include connections to faith-based and other community organizations that will provide ongoing career counseling services for the students.

3. Your program is ambitious. How do you intend to fund this program?

High school students and high school dropouts are the labor market of the future. Therefore, attracting investors from the public and private sector should not be difficult. Even when this program is not framed as being related to social justice, it should be possible to attract investments that recognize the importance of investing in the up and coming labor market. Government funding will comprise a significant amount of investment in the career counseling program. The funding can be from the Department of Labor as well as the Department of Education, and its state level subsidiaries. In addition to these direct and immediate sources of funding, the career counseling program attracts funding from arts councils and other organizations designed to help people access public funds.
In addition to the public sector funding, this program attracts investors from the nonprofit sector. The nonprofit sector offers opportunities for funding a wide variety of specific initiatives, such as young entrepreneurs and young minority entrepreneurs. Because a large number of high school students at risk for dropping out and high school dropouts are from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds, the nonprofit sector will open pathways for accessing resources that would not be available otherwise.
The private sector is an important source of funding for this career counseling program. For one, the private sector is where many of the volunteer mentors and employers will come from, offering their services to help guide and train young people interested in their career fields. The private sector will also offer high school students and high school dropouts the jobs they need to gain traction in a career or to learn about a specific field of interest. Finally, the private sector will offer direct financial investment in the program. Organizations will realize that investing in young people will improve the brand identity of these firms, improving their standards of corporate social responsibility.

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