Barriers to Employment Success Inventory – 5th Edition

The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory – 5th Edition helps you achieve a more effective job search and identify those hurdles and obstacles that stand in the way of your job success.

Barriers to Employment Success Inventory 5th Edition gives individuals a quick and easy way to identify the hurdles and obstacles that stand in the way of job success. Though it takes only 20 to 30 minutes to complete, this powerful inventory not only helps people conduct a more effective job search, it helps them be more successful on the job as well.

Test takers rate 50 simple statements covering five categories: Personal and Financial, Emotional and Physical, Career Decision-Making and Planning, Job-Seeking Knowledge, and Education and Training. After users have identified their barriers, BESI suggests ways to overcome them and helps individuals develop an employment success plan that can be used in groups or individual career counseling meetings.

What’s It Best Used For

This inventory functions as a powerful discovery and planning tool for career counselors, employment centers, workforce development programs, and HR departments looking to support job seekers or internal employees facing professional stagnation.

• Pinpointing Hurdles Across 5 Categories: The assessment maps out specific struggles across five vital life dimensions: Personal & Financial, Emotional & Physical, Career Decision-Making & Planning, Job-Seeking Knowledge, and Education & Training.
• Building a Concrete Action Plan: Once obstacles are identified, the tool provides built-in action strategies and guides the user through setting achievable, structured goals to actively overcome their unique employment barriers.
• Streamlining Career Counseling: Because it groups and color-codes similar concerns together, it simplifies the scoring process, serving as an ideal visual framework to kickstart productive one-on-one or group career coaching sessions.
• Modernized & Fair Benchmarks: The 5th edition features updated, 21st-century workplace language and provides separate statistical norm averages for both men and women to give advisors cleaner context.

Revisions to the Fifth Edition of the BESI

The following changes were made from the fourth edition to the fifth edition of the BESI:

In Step 1

items in the BESI were updated to be less redundant, reflective of the 21st century workplace, and more representative of each of the five barrier categories on the BESI. In addition, the term barriers was replaced by the term concerns to better represent the items contained in each section. Finally, boldfaced lead-in phrases (“What is my current level of concern about”) were added to provide participants with a framework for understanding the context of each item.

In Step 2

the profile instructions were changed to simplify the scoring. Similar items were grouped so that they could be scored together, rather than recalculated multiple times. Therefore, all of the color-coded items from the same barrier category were grouped together.

In Step 4

additional possible actions were included so that participants would be better able to develop strategies for addressing and overcoming any barriers to employment success they may be experiencing. Another change in Step 4 was the elimination of the Helpful Resources section. These resource websites are included later in this Administrator’s Guide to ensure that administrators have the opportunity to verify the URLs before recommending them to participants.

In Step 5

the identification of achievable goals and concrete steps to achieve those goals was added.

This edition was reformatted to 8 pages instead of 6 to accommodate the referenced updates.

In the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory – 5th Edition Administrator’s Guide, means and standard deviations were included for both men and women.