It started with everyone being frustrated. One research report showed that employees spend 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings. Another report, drawing from Microsoft’s survey, showed that employees spend nearly a full workday’s time (5.6 hours) in meetings and 69% of them feel ineffective. This sort of frustration resonates with our organizations’ experience, so we were fueled with the desire to making meetings better. We tackled this organizational development problem by gathering the intelligence from a multidisciplinary team composed of an assessment consultant, research scientist, eLearning instructional designer, project manager, and psychometrician.

Should I be an entrepreneur when I grow up? It turns out that vocational interest assessments can help you figure that out.

Hold on…what are vocational interest assessments again?

A teacher or career counselor may have given you a vocational interest assessment in high school, college or university. The assessment will tell you areas you are curious and interested in, say artistic or social interests (e.g., drawing, singing, or helping people in-need), and gives you a list of jobs to look into that matches your interests. I heard that these assessments were hit or misses. A student may snicker when seeing that the list of jobs recommended includes being a rock star. Another student may feel validated that one of the top recommendations was to be a teacher, a job that they personally were interested in. However, regardless of the initial reactions of respondents, the fate of these vocational interest assessment reports tend to end up in the abyss after a 10-second scan. Unsurprisingly, researchers collectively seemed to lose interest and pursued other studies …until recently.