Career choices in the development of young people’s identity (12–19 years)
Choosing a career is not a single event but the result of a complex psychological process that begins long before an adolescent is aware of it. Vocational identity is built over time, through exposure, reflection, identification and rejection, through testing one’s own limits and through recurring questions about meaning, value and direction. Two dimensions become essential in this process: professional interests – the stable attractions towards certain kinds of activity – and professional values – the internal reference points that give work its meaning and make it congruent with the adolescent’s self-image.
In applied psychological practice, assessing these dimensions has more than a guiding value for choosing a career. It is deeply transformative: it helps the adolescent organise the mental content of their motivation, recognise their authentic inclinations and align their aspirations with a coherent internal system of values. Unlike aptitude tests, which measure what a young person can do, assessing professional interests and values answers the question of what really moves them, what motivates them in the long term and in what direction the meaning of work projects itself for them.
In the practice, these assessments can be used from the age of 12 – the point at which an adolescent becomes able to give stable answers about preferences and values, even if these are still partly influenced by the social context. They become all the more relevant in middle and late adolescence, when young people begin actively to structure their vocational identity and face significant choices: which secondary-school stream, which university direction, a first job, volunteering or extracurricular projects.
Using standardised questionnaires in this process brings two major advantages. The first is objectification: instead of choices being guided solely by other people’s opinions or by circumstantial impulses, the adolescent has access to a set of scientifically validated information about themselves, which they can analyse rationally and discuss with the psychologist. The second is formative: the questionnaires do not merely give results; they open a process of guided reflection in which the young person learns to name their interests, rank their values and take ownership of their choices.
At my practice, the assessment of professional values and interests is carried out with two complementary instruments:
- The Interest Assessment Questionnaire (CEI) – designed to explore preferences for different fields of activity, structured into representative occupational areas.
- The Professional Values Questionnaire – devoted to investigating the system of personal values relevant to work: autonomy, stability, social impact, personal development, competition, work-life balance and so on.
Both instruments are used as self-assessments, from the age of 12, adapted to the adolescent’s age, level of awareness and capacity for reflection. They are administered at the practice, in a secure setting with appropriate psychological support, followed by a session of interpretation and clinical integration of the results.
The process is not automated – the clinical psychologist plays an essential part in contextualising the data, formulating vocational hypotheses and offering a framework for strategic, realistic thinking about the future. In this way the adolescent does not simply receive a list of “matches”, but learns to build a personal architecture of meaning around work and around how they will live their working life.
In concrete terms, these instruments are recommended in the following situations:
- adolescents who are undecided about which secondary-school stream or university direction to choose;
- young people wavering between several vocational options, with no clear criteria for distinguishing them;
- high-achieving pupils with a low level of intrinsic motivation;
- adolescents following a direction imposed on them (by family or culture) but feeling an internal incongruence;
- cases of identity conflict or regression in planning for the future;
- orientation for vocational counselling or early career guidance.
It is important to note that these assessments do not replace a therapeutic process, but they can form part of a broader intervention of exploration, motivation and identity alignment. They can act as a trigger, as an instrument of self-understanding or as decision support at key moments of personal development.
📘 In adolescence, choices without inner content become burdens. Assessing professional interests and values does not guarantee success, but it guarantees clarity. And direction is born of clarity.
How it works in practice
Psychometric instruments are not used in isolation. At the practice, a test forms part of a complete psychological assessment: clinical interview, choice of the instruments suited to your question, interpretation, a written report and a session in which I explain the results in language you can go on using.
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Cabinet Individual de Psihologie Ileana Vlad · Corbeanca, Ilfov · 0753 453 262