Counselors' judgments of the quality of the prescreening stage of the career decision-making process

The first stage of the career decision-making process is prescreening, which aims at locating promising alternatives deserving further exploration. J. L. Holland's (1997) concepts of differentiation, consistency, and coherence were adapted to cases in which an individual's career-related preferences, which serve as guidelines for locating such promising alternatives, are expressed in many work aspects (e.g., length of training, income, work environment) and not merely in terms of vocational interests. The assumption was that, as for interests, the optimal starting point is crystallized preferences. Judgments of 29 career counseling psychologists and 48 counseling graduate students who were presented with information about the career-related preferences of 18 hypothetical clients supported the hypotheses that crystallized preferences are differentiated, that they are consistent, and that they are coherent. The judgments of these experts on 9 lists of occupations supported the hypothesis that the desirable outcome of the prescreening stage is a concise and homogeneous list of promising alternatives.