Motivations and Interests
Interests are the most natural starting point when exploring the world of work. When we ask ourselves: ‘What do I want to do?’ Our answers reveal what we see as being exciting, challenging and fun – in short, what we are interested in.
Affinity Consultancy uses the following inventories to explore individual interests and motivations:
Career Interests Inventory (CII)
CII - using John Holland’s vocational model it examines preferences from three perspectives, giving a rich and stimulating source of information for exploration of potential career areas.
The perspectives are:
Interests – a normative and ipsative assessment of interests, giving alternative benchmarks for interpretation;
Competencies – self-report of key work-related skills and abilities;
Work styles – an assessment of preferred working styles.
The CII acts as a focus for career exploration. Respondents are encouraged to widen their personal exploration by looking at how their competencies and work styles relate to their interests, so setting an agenda for potential development.
The CII reports encourage research into potential careers, containing links to careers libraries and a range of online resources for further information. Prompts also encourage critical reflection on the CII results, so supporting respondents through the first stage of their career decision-making.
The Resilience Scales (RS)
RS provide a multi-dimensional assessment of the ways in which people react to difficult or challenging experiences. They were designed to reflect the cognitive, behavioural and emotional elements of resilience and describe coping styles in terms of attitudes, beliefs, and typical behaviour, in five general areas:
- Self-esteem: Attitude to and perception of self in terms of self-esteem, personal confidence, and competence;
- Optimism: Attitude to and perception of the world in terms of optimism, fairness, and future prospects;
- Self-discipline: How someone manages their behaviour in terms of determination, perseverance, and reliability;
- Control: How someone systematically manages the environment and their ability to adapt;
- Emotional non-defensiveness: How someone feels in terms of openness, tension and tolerance.
The RS have been constructed so that it is resistant to ‘faking’ and contains a ‘managing your image’ scale. Care has also been taken to make sure that it does not have a ‘clinical’ feel.
The Values-based Indicator of Motivation (VbIM)
VBiM is based on a fresh model of values assessed in a new way. It maps traditional values like reward, influence, and altruism and matches these with more contemporary concerns relating to relationships, as well as more abstract concepts. It provides both breadth and depth and gives insight into the balance between individual and group/societal values, and those, which are sources of individual satisfaction or meaning. In this way the questionnaire is centered on four areas and comprises 24 scales:
- What I want for myself: reward, fame, well-being, excitement, change, conceptual;
- What I want to become: personal growth, career progression, influence, legacy, wisdom, transcendence;
- What I want from others: social contact, integrity, connection, openness, collaboration, inclusion;
- What I want from society: altruism, tradition, culture, harmony, libertarian, accountability.
VbIM uses the latest technology to provide more sophisticated assessment by combining both normative and ipsative approaches within the same questionnaire. This lets people look at the relative strength of their own values, and the priority they give to each, as well as providing a means of benchmarking against the pattern of values that prevail in the general population.
