Overview

Purpose: To assess personality in order to facilitate career decision-making.

For: All those with average vocabulary from Year 6 onwards.

Length: Untimed (usually 10 to 25 minutes).

Format: Pen and paper.

Materials: Professional manual, interpretive manual, question booklet, profile sheet.

How a person prefers to relate to others, how people react to pressure, how dependable they are in performing tasks, how they approach problem solving and how they behave in a group are all important for individuals' career decision making. The CPS is an Australian measure designed to assess these personality trait dimensions often called "The Big Five":

-	Social Orientation - assesses individual differences in people's preferences for social activity and social interaction.
-	Cognitive Orientation - assesses individual differences in people's preferences for thinking about and solving problems.
-	Interpersonal Orientation - assesses individual differences in people's preferences for relating to other individuals and how they handle conflict with others.
-	Task Orientation - assesses individual differences in people's preferences for how they approach tasks.
-	Emotional Orientation - assesses individual differences in people's reaction to stress and pressure.

The CPS-1 also assesses the tendency to give socially desirable responses though the Favourable Impression scale. Those who have high scores on this scale give high ratings to items which people believe are sensitive to positive distortion of responses.

The CPS-1 is composed of 100 descriptive adjectives or phrases which people use frequently to to characterize both themselves and others. Through extensive research these items have been established as both reliable and valid measures of the five personality trait dimensions outlined. Most other measures of these dimensions have been constructed for use in clinical contexts. The CPS-1 was explicitly constructed to relate the five dimensions to the world of work. The authors reviewed a wide range of literature relating personality to occupations and as a result produced for the CPS-1 an Interpretive Manual which summarises over 50 years of research relating these five personality trait dimensions to a variety of occupations.

Among the uses for the CPS-1 are the following: as a measure of work-related personality; as an indicator non-cognitive factor influential in educational and work adjustment and achievement; as a measure of adjustment to disability; as a guide to the most appropriate forms counselling or training for particular clients; as an employment indicator of clients' level of "people orientation"; for staff selection and personnel development programmes.