One more thing! Are career tests helpful or harmful to a young person's agency?

Liv and Marian have a lot to say, and One more thing! is where some of that overflow ends up. These are bonus, bite-sized pieces of conversation that don't end up making it into the final episode, but they are too good to leave on the cutting room floor. 

In this one: Career tests have been matching people to jobs since the 1900s. AI is just doing it faster - and taking your data. Marian and Liv dig into why schools keep reaching for career tests and inventories, and why handing a young person a set of results might not be that helpful when it comes to decision-making about the future. 

They also get into the AI career matching tools multiplying in the market right now, and Liv explores the idea of collective uncertainty: the particular moment we're in where nobody has a clear map, and designing education for that might mean unlearning almost everything about how we've done it before.

Research and articles referenced in this episode:

Laing, B. and Pennie, L. (2026) The Scaffolding Illusion: why career tests aren’t the structures students need. 

Whiston, S. C., Li, Y., Goodrich Mitts, N., & Wright, L. (2017).
 Effectiveness of career choice interventions: A meta-analytic replication and extension. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 100, 175–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2017.03.010 

Wong ZY, Quek FYX and Yang H (2026) RIASEC self-assessment tools as career interventions: theory and effectiveness. Front. Organ. Psychol. 4:1792707. doi: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1792707

Get in touch

Find us on Instagram @thegreatcareersprogram and on Substack at thegreatcareersprogram.substack.com for episode recaps, research links, and the conversation between episodes. Got a question, a story, or something you want us to talk about? Email us at hi@thegreatcareersprogram.com.

Credits

The Great Careers Program is a collaboration between BECOME Education and Coherence Co-Lab, and is hosted and produced by Liv Pennie and Marian Wright, with production support from Bev Laing. Music by Chad Crouch.

Transcript

Marian 0:00

Hello listeners, it's Marian here. It won't surprise you to know that when Liv and I sit down to do one of these episodes, we have a lot to talk about. And inevitably, some things don't make it into the final episode. So we had this idea to produce some of these bite-sized episodes, these mini deep dives, if you will, to look at specific ideas that were related to career education and schooling. The one that you're about to listen to is a look specifically at career tests and inventories, how schools use them, what value they might have, and where in fact they might be doing a bit of damage. In fact, I learned through this conversation with Liv that this idea of matching people to certain jobs and careers actually goes back to the 1900s. So it's not as innovative as we might think. We also touch on these AI career matching tools that are popping up. We talk about this idea of designing education for chaos and uncertainty. And I really hope that it's an interesting and concise piece of content that you enjoy. Liv and I also just want to say huge thanks to everybody who's listened and reached out since we first officially launched. If you'd like to help more people out there find us, please give us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts and share this episode or one that you've listened to before with someone else who might think it's useful or interesting.

Is there a downside of career testing?

Marian 1:33

Famously, you've written something about how career tests and career inventories are perhaps not the quality career education that we hope it is. Lots of schools are using career profiling, career inventories. There's, dare I say it, career AI coaches that will match you to some courses and careers after you answer some questions for them. Arguably, on the surface, these things feel like they're useful in terms of giving young people knowledge about themselves. What is the danger of them?

Liv 2:06

I've written a lot and talked a lot about it. Um, to be clear, I'm not against all tests and career inventories. They don't count as careers education because for me, education and careers education is about giving young people and people the skills to explore, design, and navigate their own future. That means we need to be able to think about it. Now, anything that's outsources that, speak guidance, you might get an extra injection of guidance. That would be where a career test sit. But it's very different to education. How often in schools it's like you've got a careers. What's your career's program? And that's one thing. It might be, oh well, in year 10, we've got this platform or we use this platform. But that is one tool for one part of the job. Now that might be for organizing work experience or having your career guidance interviews or giving them lots of information or having virtual work experience, all really good stuff, but they don't count as careers education, which is embedding the skills. You know, we talk so much about the future of work and we need critical thinking, adaptability, lifelong learners. A test is designed for a one-off answer. And that model of supporting a single decision when the system needs it is not careers education. And it's not sustainable and it's not teaching us self-efficacy. So first they're very different.

Liv 3:21

If then we go, okay, careers education is essential, but when it gets to the pointy end, we also want something that's tangible. And I think a lot of the time tests are used because it you can show something that's been done. Everyone loves doing something that tells them something about themselves. Um, so the first thing I would say is they are not the way to make a decision. If you're really set on having something, there should be that extra injection of insight, not the way you make the decision. We cannot outsource this

AI career matching doesn't account for human complexity.

Liv 3:48

decision. This is the last decision we should outsource to anything, especially AI, because these tests and way of doing career matching and as if there's one one answer, have been around for, you know, more than 70, 80 years as the way we do career decision making. And they've also been shown not to be very effective for about 40 years. And when you get an answer that says, you're this, this, this, and here's the top five jobs, how many really, if we think about it in a school, and we've all experienced these tests or have young people that have experienced them, how many of those tests actually show the young person or the parent anything they don't know already?

Liv 4:25

My son is in year 10 at the moment, going through it, and the school decided, I'm not gonna say hot school, decided to use a test. And he was told that he should um that he was great, really organized, which he is absolutely not, but it was kind of self-reported and he could answer the test in the right way. Um, and that his ideas for the future, ship's captain, because I think he said he liked geography, and event organizing. It's totally both he dismissed out of hand just sort of pointless. I wanted it to say something new, to tell me some insight that I didn't know, tell me some ideas that I hadn't thought of before. He said it was all the same boring stuff. That's often the way. Uh, but even when, even when it is up-to-date information, even when it's valid, reliable, evidence-based, they are still designed by reducing the person. It's that flattening of the individual and expecting that there is a single answer for now. And not to schools will say, oh, it's just a conversation starter. But we've got better ways to and cheaper ways to start conversations than a test. Yes, they're not a proxy, they're not an answer or a substitute for doing the thinking. These are essential skills we're gonna need for the future of work. It's the last thing we should be outsourcing. And I think now with, you know, so m the barrier to entry of creating AI bots that can do it as well. The number that have no evidence base fail to account for the complexity and the potential of the individual. It's really dangerous. As all those adults said, I wish we'd had something better at school. Uh, we can end up doing that that we've always done really badly a lot faster, make it much easier to tick the box on something we should be spending more time on and going broader and deeper.

Marian 6:02

I was remembering a student who did one of these tests and he, I think, had aspirations to be in medicine. And this quiz came out and said he'd make a great stonemason. And I just remember the the sort of crisis this kid had, you know, seeing something, being told that he fit the category of something that he didn't align with at all. And I thought a lot about, you know, we teach kids to to think critically in schools. And so we went on this process where we looked critically at what this quiz was saying about him. But I think often we don't let kids make the critical action as well. And for him, the critical action was I'm just gonna ditch it. I'm actually not gonna use that as a piece of data to make a decision about myself. And that when I think our school processes anchor on those kind of certain pathways, certain career choices, because I think that's that's how the system of school is built. We need to have boundaries around things to contain things to be able to report on them, but also I think to give a sense of certainty to a parent and a child about the impact and the overall purpose and quality of schooling that they've experienced. You know, it's

Questioning the future we've been sold.

Marian 7:16

leading them somewhere.  

Liv 7:17

Yeah. I've just been listening to a great podcast series that's a spin-off from the rest is politics in the UK, and it's about the doom and gloom of the generations. And you know, they feel like they've been missold the traditional thing. And they've just said, none of it is true. I'm coming out with debt. So there is a real social backlash and questioning, and AI is just exacerbating that because now parents are going, like, wow, what's gonna happen to all our jobs as well as the entry-level jobs. So I think now is the time to go thingy thought is not necessarily true. And it's that collective uncertainty. We've always had individual uncertainty and you know, different demographics would go through uncertainty at different times. But now I think it's across the board, and particularly the people that were traditionally very safe and secure, are now seeing their kids not so secure. So everything is being questioned, and we have to question it and we have to have to give them more agency over those choices. And I think year 10 subject selections, uh, year 10, because we're in Australia talking about it, but those senior subject selections are the first real point of are they prepared for their future?

Marian 8:24

And I think there's a design challenge in itself for how do we design education for chaos and uncertainty and nonlinear futures, and like you said, this collective uncertainty. How do we become really comfortable with that? Which is really tricky because historically we have designed schooling around the exact opposite. So this is, I think, what this is bringing to the surface is really a need to rethink and reimagine. And I would say that in order to rethink and reimagine, one of the things we actively have to do is unlearn the ways that we have always done it before. There are some really deep mental models and some assumptions that work under the surface of how we do this.

Liv 9:06

There's a like a natural human clamouring for certainty. We want answers we don't like, ambiguity, and and a lot of our work, and I think the work of, you know, if we're truly saying we're preparing people to navigate their future, a lot of our work in designing careers education that does that is based on the chaos theory of careers, and Dr. Jim Bright has been very involved in become from the beginning. And that is to say that this is complex and that careers are nonlinear, they are subject to change, chance, complexity, uncertainty is almost the only certainty we have. So there is no option but to prepare people to thrive in that, to look at opportunities, to stay curious, to be adaptive, to learn how to navigate like a whole lifetime of course adjustments as you change and the world around you changes. And that's the point of careers education. I think if we go back to 1900s, career development theory was trait matching. In the 1900s, this was it's Frank Parsons, it was just like there are some traits that you have and that we can match with careers, off you go. It's still the way we're doing it. And pretending that things are stable, linear, it just doesn't work. We have to embrace the complexity and go, this is exciting. It's life, it's messy, it's complex, and we live in systems, we're not in a vacuum. So it's the same for the human side as the school system side.

What messages do we give to students through schooling and career education design?

Liv 10:29 Marian 10:29

Because there is a point to getting that sort of data about yourself and going through that metacognitive process. But what if we use that process to then go, what kind of career could I design from this? Instead of matching me to a certain job or a certain course, what would it look like if I took all of these things that I knew about me to then design a career and a life really that I would feel really good about living? And that that's attention, I think, in schooling that I think that some of that data, and this is very much Marian's opinion, but systems thinking would say that behaviour correlates directly to structures. And so the kinds of behaviors we're seeing in young people and the kinds of data we're seeing about young people not reporting confidence, I think is is related to how we structure these processes and how we structure the ongoing career education at school instead of just those sort of single point, single points of intervention.

Speaker 11:30

100% agree. Like as you're a student going, okay, what's important to think about and what's what are the skills I need to focus on to set me up for the future? You're going, well, clearly, I'm looking at the school day and the school structure, and I'm going, Well, it's uh literacy and numeracy, actually, how I navigate my life and what I do with all that knowledge and skills, that metacognitive skill, how do I put myself together with the world of work, is not important at all. I can do that in 15 minutes in year 10, which is so backwards because what we also know is that if students have the chance to think about their future and express those aspirations and develop them over time, the impact on their engagement and their learning and their well-being and their hope for the future is massively boosted. So it is like almost having careers education in earlier in the structure is this superpower that most of the other challenges that we face in education. And I spend a lot of my time in my day job talking about the return on education, because you know, this does take time and everything lands on schools. But it's it's this multiplier effect. If we do this well, everything else becomes easier and we can't just hammer things in. But when students do this, develop those skills to navigate their future, get excited about their future, why would we leave all of that till the last minute when it's so core to everything they're doing? What they're thinking about their future and how hard they work and what they focus on is right below the surface of how they approach their learning, how motivated they are and how they feel and how they show up at school. So structurally, absolutely, we're indicating that it doesn't matter and it's not important. Whereas actually, from a systems piece, putting it back at the center as actually really central to the core purpose of education would be a huge benefit. It's just such an easy lever that's that we've missed.

Marian 13:15

And crucially, I think the point that you have made about it's not just about career education being done earlier and consistently. It's also about career education as meaning making and sense making and not just information delivery. This is not just about passive engagement with events and speakers and, you know, I think all of those sort of historical ways that we've come to design career education in school. There has to be points, consistent points throughout that journey and that process where the young people are critically reflecting and critically acting on what they have experienced.

Liv 13:55

And and how that leads to the next point. Now, like I'd love the subject selection for us to evaluate subject selection, not as that tick box, but as a student, do we evaluate? Have we done this well? Can the student say, This is all my own idea? For me, that's you know, when we look at the shape of aspirations, uh, how they're choosing, if they could actually like we have all my own work, the anti plagiarism, the plagiarism content. If we had a micro credential that also said, yes, this is all my own idea, for me, that's how we should be measuring success.