Career Directions Inventory

The Career Directions Inventory facilitates educational and career exploration and counseling for high school, college, university students and adults.

A Road-map To A Satisfying Career

The Career Directions Inventory (CDI) is a flexible, cost-effective tool designed to facilitate educational and career exploration. The CDI is suitable for a wide spectrum of the population, not only those headed for post-secondary education or a professional career. The CDI can be used for career and educational counseling for high school, college, and university students, career planning for adults, career transitions, and career exploration in a wide variety of fields, including business, professional, service, and technical occupations. The CDI identifies an individual’s unique interest pattern and matches those interests to academic and career paths. CDI is an accurate, easy to understand, gender-fit assessment with broad applicability to business, service, professional and technical occupations.

What It’s Best Used For

This inventory serves as an excellent foundational resource for guidance counselors, academic advisors, and career coaches to help clients identify fulfilling vocational trajectories across business, technical, service, and professional fields.

• Mapping 15 Basic Interest Scales: It maps an individual’s unique interest patterns across 15 vital occupational themes, including Administration, Art, Clerical, Food Service, Health Service, Industrial Arts, Sales, Science, and Teaching/Social Service.
• Bypassing Taker Bias: By utilizing a unique forced-choice format (requiring the respondent to choose the most and least preferred activity from groups of three job statements), the test eliminates standard response biases often found in traditional 1-to-5 Likert scales.
• Delivering Extended 20-Page Profiles: The comprehensive summary report provides deep-dive descriptions of the basic interest scales and General Occupational Themes, singling out the individual’s top three matching career clusters.
• Providing Direct Vocational Links: The final report acts as a practical roadmap by listing specific target occupations alongside standardized O*NET or NOC codes, matching career-related books, professional organizations, and helpful web resources.

Measures 15 Basic Interest Scales

• Administration
• Assertive
• Food Service
• Health Service
• Personal Service
• Sales
• Systematic Writing
• Art
• Clerical
• Industrial Arts
• Outdoors
• Persuasive
• Science
• Teaching/Social Service

The Career Directions Inventory consists of 100 sets of three equally popular job-related statements, requiring an individual to choose the most and least preferred activity. The manual provides strong support for the reliability and validity of the CDI.

Detailed CDI reports direct individuals to the most fulfilling career and provides lists of specific occupations, career related books, professional organizations, and internet links.

Best For

• Clients needing career guidance at all levels of training and education
• Clients who want to see a wide variety of career options that require varying degrees of education and training
• Counselors who prefer to handle interpretation
• Software or mail-in administration and report

The CDI can be administered on SigmaSoft for Windows. The software is installed on your own computer and reports can be generated immediately. Results are presented using graphs, numbers, scale descriptions, and career information that is insightful and easy to understand.

Forced-Choice Format

The CDI employs a forced-choice format asking respondents to indicate the most preferred and least preferred activities from three options. This format offers an improvement over Likert rating scales as it minimizes susceptibility to response bias and helps the test taker discriminate between career interests. Using forced-choice format eliminates this source of response bias.

Low-Cost Guidance

Choosing a career is one of the most important decisions a person can make. The CDI simplifies the career planning process by matching an individual’s unique set of interests with a wide variety of related careers and occupations. The CDI has been designed as a flexible and low-cost career planning resource.

Comprehensive Results

The CDI report presents easy-to-understand profiles, as well as descriptions of the Basic Interest Scales, and General Occupational Themes. The report helps to facilitate career exploration with detailed explanations of the top three job clusters that match an individual’s patterns of interest. This section also provides lists of specific occupations with corresponding O*NET or NOC codes, and helpful resources such as books, professional organizations, and websites related to the individual’s top career interests.

Administration Overview

Qualification Level: A
Administer to: 14 years old and older
Administration time: 30 minutes
Number of items: 100 items
Scoring Options: Mail-in/Software
Report Length: Extended – 20 pages

Additional Languages

French version available for: Q & A Booklets, Mail-in Extended Report