Thirty years ago, while in the middle of post-doctoral
training, a number of friends and my now ex-wife traveled to Chicago for
aptitude testing at the Johnson O'Connor Institute. I was not excited
about the prospect of learning that I might be in the wrong profession after
having devoted as much time as I had (and was) to training, so I did not invest
in learning more about my own aptitudes then.
Now, with retirement looming at some point in a rapidly oncoming future
and with kids who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives, the
reluctant wife and I decided to see what this aptitude stuff was all
about. Though there are centers in major
metropolitan areas around the country, the reluctant son is going to school in
Chicago, so we booked two Thursday/Friday testing sessions with a joint
feedback session Friday afternoon and decided to stay through the weekend to
enjoy Chicago and have some family time.
Much to my surprise, Johnson O’Connor, the founder of the
institution, was not a psychologist, nor are the folks who administer,
interpret, or do ongoing research on the battery of tests that he
developed. He worked for General Electric in Boston
in the 1920s, which I knew, but he was an engineer, not an
Industrial-Organizational psychologist, as I had assumed. I learned from the materials that were handed
out at the end of the testing that the plant where O’Connor worked needed to
figure out how to hire people who would do well there, and he came up with some
tasks that assessed skills needed to do industrial work. He approached this as an engineer – which is
essentially the same as an I-O psychologist’s approach. He gathered data and looked at how well the
tasks he used (two that are still in the battery today – tasks that I massively
failed at doing well in) predicted the productivity of potential workers. Well, they did predict as he thought they would. And soon, with GE’s blessing, he opened a
non-profit research group to look at how to help people match their aptitudes –
or basic skills – with the work that they would be doing.
My understanding of his theory – which does not seem to be
articulated in the current book – and may be flawed as twenty years have passed
since I heard my friends talking about it – is that he believed that we would
be happiest when we are doing what we do well. He also, as I remember it, believed that we would NOT be happy if we weren’t using the
parts of our brains that work the best – we would essentially always feel that
there was an itch that needed to be scratched.
So he looked for tests to add to his battery that would tap into a wide
variety of aptitudes – or basic abilities.
He believed – and apparently gathered data to support – that the tests
to be of most use would not be tapping into learned skills, but into abilities
that we are essentially born with. So a
recent test has been added that taps into aesthetic sensibilities – and to
determine if it is really doing that students at the Chicago High School for
the Visual Arts (or something like that) were tested when they entered and when
they left and their performance on the test did not change. This was seen as evidence that the test was
not something that is based in learning some sort of skill or perspective, but on something inborn.
A quick caution from a psychologist is in order here. In the first half of the 20th Century, we thought that IQ tests were based on aptitudes alone, and this caused us to take all kinds of positions that are today totally indefensible. I do not know how the O'Connor staff has researched or what their thoughts are about the intersection of experience more broadly - cultural and class experience - with aptitude, but I think this is an area for study rather than assumption.
To return, though, the second part of O'Connor's hypothesis – the idea that people would be happy
when they were doing work that tapped into their skill sets - he ascertained by
testing people doing a variety of jobs and measuring what the job required of
them, what their aptitudes were – and the fit between these – and how happy the
people were. He also evaluated how
productive they were. Not surprisingly,
the “natural” salesmen in sales jobs rated their happiness highly and they were
productive. But a “natural” salesman
working as an isolated researcher was less likely both to be happy and
productive.
 |
| Normal Curve |
A final piece that I remember is that, in order to find the “natural”
part of ourselves, O’Connor was looking for tests that had a particular unusual
statistical quality: instead of people being normally distributed on the tests,
the way they are on IQ tests or with weight or height, he wanted to find tests
with a U shaped distribution – that is people either do well or poorly, but not
so much in between. Now I don’t know if
this is true. In the interpretation of
the results of our tests, Michele simply referenced the percentile scores and
said they were interested in the tests that were high – above the 70th
percentile, and those that were low – below the 30th
percentile. So, whatever the distribution
of the tests, it is the things that we do well and those that we do poorly that
are of most interest.
 |
| u shaped curve |
We arrived at the building – which is right off Michigan
Avenue’s Magnificent Mile and is an old, somewhat seedy place, with a salon on
the first floor and a design studio of some sort beside it, with an architecture firm
somewhere in the back, but a brass plate over the door stating that we were in
the right place. We came into the lobby
and, after trying the wrong door, found the sign to ring up and we were buzzed
in and told to come to the second floor.
The stair case tilted a bit and felt like it might fall out of the wall
at any minute, but once we got to the office, the floor was steady enough, even if
the area looked well used in, as the reluctant wife put it, the way that a
graduate student office looks well used.
We spent Thursday afternoon and Friday morning being traded back and
forth between sitting in front of a computer screen to do paper and pencil tests
in response to visual and auditory feedback and then working with one of the staff
on tasks that they presented to us in person and evaluated as we went along.
The staff were friendly and deeply engaged in their
work. A few other people were being
tested at the same time and everything moved quickly and efficiently. As the in-person testing proceeded, we were
given feedback after each test both about what it was measuring and about how
we had done on it. The staff seemed to
have drunk the water – they seemed really to believe that what was being tested
was not something we could study for (test scores don’t improve much when
people retake the tests) nor was a result of anything other than an aptitude –
and we all have some aptitudes and not others – and what the testing can do is
help us realize what our strengths and weaknesses are – and this will help us
lead better lives. So there was not a
sense that we were being negatively evaluated when we didn’t do well – it just
was what it was. Nor was there a sense
of praise for having a skill – again, it was what it was and it was useful to
know that we had that.
The feedback session, then, was quite helpful. I have not had a chance to review all of the
materials – to let all of the ideas sink in – nor to integrate the materials
with a master life plan, but even at what is the beginning of a process, I have
a sense that the information will be helpful as I work towards whatever it is
that comes next – and it helped me understand some things (like why it is that
blogging has been so useful to me that I have kept it up for six years despite
having more than enough other things to do) and, somewhat surprisingly, it
helped illuminate some of the areas of friction between the reluctant wife and
me – places where our ways of functioning are determined by our differing
aptitudinal patterns – and I think this will help us navigate some of the
predictable pinch points that will continue to come up with slightly more grace
and aplomb. I think we will be able to
say something like – "Ah ha, this is a place where you are ready to move ahead
with a plan and have already come up with a sense of how to get from here to
there, but I am still generating options and thinking about how we might skin
this cat from a very different angle."
Perhaps we will be able to laugh about this rather than to simply
devolve into being grumpily frustrated. In any case, a guy can hope…
The feedback is primarily focused on vocational applications,
but quite a bit of it has avocational implications as well. One area of assessment, for instance, has to
do with musical ability. And there are
many ways that one’s musicality is related to vocational performance. A sense of timing, for instance, is going to
play a big role in that natural salesman’s ability to close a deal. But it also has implications for avocational
interests. Timing plays a bigger role in
some sports than in others. And O’Connor
is very interested in people using their musical talents – if they have them –
as an important component of that elusive quality of becoming happy. The assessment of musical aptitude includes
tone sensitivity as well as sensitivity to melody and different musical
instruments are recommended depending on the abilities of the person tested.
Traditional career counseling is based in preferences rather
than aptitudes. My own thinking is that
preferences are likely related to aptitudes, but not as directly as we might
imagine. The last exercise was to engage
in a standard preference test – the Holland Self Determined Search test. This asks about one’s interests and self-assessment
of abilities to engage in a variety of activities and careers. I last did something like this when I was in 7th
or 8th grade. It was
interesting to take a preference test, then, as an adult and recognize some things that I might
have thought of as glamorous or interesting earlier were just drudgery as I have
had to do them at some point as an adult, and other things that I thought I
would do well at I wasn’t particularly well suited for. One of the uses of the Self Directed Search is that it will recommend many occupations - and these can be checked against the aptitudes for fit. There really is a sense of open ended exploration in the process.
The results of the testing as a whole, while not surprising,
were also not predictable. I learned not
just about individual aptitudes, but about what it means to have two or three
in combination and there were various strategies that were proposed that would
help me scratch some itches that have largely gone unscratched. Psychoanalysis – the practice of coming to
understand the unconscious functioning of the mind – does not tell us much
about things that we are better measured objectively than subjectively. The objective measurement of this testing led
to the beginning of a different kind of insight based on (what I hope will be)
growth. I think the two kinds of growth
should be complementary – indeed synergistic.
Of course, part of the way I work (I learned from Johnson O’Connor) is
to think that more data is almost always good.
One of the central reasons to undertake the testing at this
point – how to plan for retirement activities that will allow the reluctant
wife and me to plot a course where we can utilize our aptitudes together – is still
very much a work in progress. Of course
I will probably still be thinking about permutations on it long after she has
settled on a plan. One of the
realizations we had as we discussed the testing during one of the many breaks
is that having a sense of what each do well might be something that we should do
more of – and not feel guilty when the other does that (or resentful when it is
ourselves) as long as there is a general balance. So I will continue to do more of the cooking
(and gardening) as we move forward.
What we might end up doing – what kind of work we might do
together as we drop some of the time consuming things that we engage in to make
a living – is much more complicated than just doing things that we do
well. It also has to do with investing
ourselves in things that we feel passionate about. Finding the overlap between our separate
passions and abilities will be complicated, but having data – and a feedback
session focused on how our abilities overlap and intersect – feels like an
important component of that process.
In the meanwhile, the Johnson O'Connor group is going to sell the building they are in. So if you go to the place in Chicago it may look new and spiffy. They assured me it would still be downtown. Some of the testing materials are based on stimuli that have proved tried and true, and have been around a very long time - much like my dearly beloved Rorschach test and some of the other instruments that I use. They are likely to feel out of place in a new building, but be reassured that they come from a place that has been much loved and cared for as it has grown worn and creaky from useful service.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.
No comments:
Post a Comment