Reviews of “Match Up! Your Personality to College Majors” e-Book

"I like Match-Up! a lot … I like that the text is limited to essential information and not heavy on theory or padded with excess information."

Camille Numrich
Director Career Services
Community College of Rhode Island

 

"Match Up is a user-friendly resource for helping individuals see what types of majors link to your personality. Dr. Jones begins the book with an overview of how a person’s Holland types (interest and personality traits) can inform their options. The e-book is rich with colors and interactive links that make reading the book not only easy and enjoyable, but reader-centered. For example, page 8 outlines 5 steps to finding a “good” match between interests and majors or training programs. On that page, the reader has the option of continuing reading or clicking on the step which matches their current description and hyperlinking directly to that information. The authors also provide tips on how to use the external resources that are provided in Match Up. They also provide background information on how Match Up was created, and address issues such as sex stereotyping in pictures.

The authors describe the role of career assessments, such as the Career Key, in organizing interests and personality types and linking them to occupations. The book includes information on sample occupations and majors related to each Holland type. Also helpful is the caution against using any assessment without knowing whether the assessment is valid, as this can be harmful and also lead to making decisions on misinformation.

Match Up encourages a learner-centered interaction between understanding one’s key personality types and occupational and training information. For example, a person may look at educational programs based on primary Holland type, and then link to a description of specific types of majors.

Match Up will be of great use to students and counselors who need to provide a list of options related to personality in a quick manner. This book also corresponds nicely with current theories such as Cognitive Information Processing Theory, as it provides individuals with components essential to the career decision making process, i.e., self-knowledge, occupational knowledge and decision making skills.

It is amazing that a text of 363 pages can feel so seamless and manageable online. The book is very easy to navigate and there are plenty of “anchors” to help find your way back in case you go off on a tangent exploring. Jones and Jones have managed to take an enormous amount of information and package it in a user-friendly interactive product that puts this information into one resource. This would be a very useful tool in a computer lab for high school students. The information is straightforward enough that a student could work through the materials on a self-directed manner, or counselors and teachers could have students work through the book for an assignment. It would be possible to work through the book quickly in one period’s worth of time, or to go through it more systematically over several class sessions.

The authors state that their goal is to “help young people and adults make the best career and educational decisions possible.” Jones and Jones have created an interactive book that provides a strong framework for accomplishing this goal. I wholeheartedly recommend this book for busy school counselors, and others who work with adolescents and young adults and have that same goal. It is a great resource that provides solid information necessary for making effective career decisions."

Debra Osborn, Ph.D
President-Elect, National Career Development Association
Associate Professor, Counselor Education
University of South Florida