Clients’ Intuitions in Career Decision Making: Should Career Counselors Trust Them?

Intuition often plays a significant role in many decisions, including career decisions. 412 deliberating individuals who used Comparing and Choosing (C&C), a free Internet-based career-decision-support system were asked about their intuitions – which occupation on their shortlist is more suitable. The occupation they marked as more suitable intuitively was compared with the outcomes of a systematic comparison of the occupations on their shortlist using C&C. Three facets of the participants’ intuitions were compared: (1) implicit––the first occupation on their shortlist; (2) explicit––the occupation they marked as more suitable; (3) the participants’ use of intuition elicited by the Career Decision-Making Profile questionnaire. C&C provides a suitability score for each occupation based on a multi-attribute decision-making model that weighs each occupation’s advantages and disadvantages. The first-listed occupation scored higher in suitability than the second, reflecting the informativeness of implicit intuitions. 74% of participants had explicit intuitions and marked one occupation on their shortlist as more suitable; for 60% of these participants, this occupation yielded the highest suitability score in C&C. As hypothesized, participants who reported a higher reliance on intuition marked intuitively the occupation that emerged as best in C&C. The limited informativeness of intuitions in career decision making was discussed.