Tag Archives: John Holland psychologist

Visual face processing abilities missing from a whiz-bang super-duper online American occupations database

The O*NET OnLine occupations database is a very impressive career counselling tool, but I think face recognition or face memory as well as the identification of facial expressions should be included among the other important job-relevant abilities listed and integrated into this database, because there are many occupations in which face processing abilities are more or less essential, and psychology researchers have demonstrated convincingly that there is a wide spectrum of face memory ability, with considerable proportions of the normal population demonstrating very high or very low ability in face memory (prosopagnosia and super-recognition).

http://www.onetonline.org/find/descriptor/browse/Abilities/1.A.4/

If you like doing questionnaires or are seeking serious advice about what job would match your personality and interests, you might like to look into the “O*NET® Computerized Interest ProfilerTM” which looks a lot like it is based on John Holland’s theory of careers and vocational choice (RIASEC). It looks like it can be downloaded, but don’t ask me about technical stuff. 

O*NET OnLine  http://www.onetonline.org/

O*NET Resource Center  http://www.onetcenter.org/