Career Guidance: Tools for Practical Applications
Chapter Titles and Summaries

Part I

• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2.  Employability Skills and Access to Assessment – Employability skills are defined. Information on a research-based resource emphasizing on access for youth to multiple assessment batteries is provided.
• Chapter 3. Why Career Assessment? – This chapter establishes the importance of using career assessment practices.
• Chapter 4. Key Aspects of Successful Assessment – The importance of appropriateness and comprehensiveness of career assessment is discussed.
• Chapter 5. Norming and Scoring Procedures – Norming procedures are defined and a technique for establishing norms for students with special needs is discussed. Typical scoring procedures are explained.
• Chapter 6. Commercially Available Tools – An array of commercially available career assessment tools are introduced. In addition, sources for finding more tools are listed.
  1. Reference Books: Three sources of information are provided for locating career assessment tools.
  2. Examples:
     1. Comprehensive Career Assessment Packet
     2. Interest Inventories
     3. Aptitude Batteries
     4. Personality Assessments
     5. Work Value Scales
     6. Career Development Inventories
  3. Card Sort Technique:  Tips for developing an appropriate tool for students with special needs are detailed.
  4. Assessment Resources on the Internet: Examples of test publisher websites, test locator atabases and online inventories are listed.
  5. Comprehensive Computer-Based Guidance Systems: Three commercially available computer-based guidance systems are introduced.
• Chapter 7. End of Part I

Part II

• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Career Aspirations and Career Expectations Survey (CACE) – The CACE survey is introduced and is proposed as a simple tool that can be used for collecting assessment information from small or large groups of students.
  1. Administration and Interpretation: Details for administering the CACE survey and interpreting its scores are provided.
  2. Customizability: Tips on how users can customize the CACE survey to suit their specific requirements are listed.
  3. Modification for Students with Special Needs: Suggestions for how the survey can be modified for students with special needs are provided.
• Chapter 3. Best Practice Example 1 – An example of a school where the school-to-career specialists provide career guidance support for all students and teachers is highlighted.
• Chapter 4. Best Practice Example 2 – A current diversified career prep teacher talks about how she infuses employability skills into her CTE classroom.
• Chapter 5. Career Clusters – The concept of career clusters is defined and additional sources of information are listed.
• Chapter 6. Keys to Success – The components that contribute to the success of career assessment programs are discussed.
• Chapter 7. Conclusion

Extra: Tips for Parents – This section is specifically targeted towards parents and we provide strategies for you to use to ensure your child’s’ career success.

Non-traditional Careers – This section gives an overview of non-traditional careers and provides information about the Women's Resource Center - an institution that provides supprt to women pursuing non-traditional course choices at Texas State Technical College in Waco, Texas.