Career Path adds the avoidance dimension to Holland code career assessment across 11 occupational activity groupings providing a complete picture of career fit.

TEMECULA, CA, UNITED STATES, May 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Core Factors today announced expanded availability of Career Path, a Holland code career assessment that measures both preference and avoidance independently across 11 occupational activity groupings. Career Path is built for executive coaches, career counselors, OD consultants, and HR professionals who have run into the limits of a traditional career interest inventory and need a more complete picture of career fit for the clients they serve.

The release reflects Core Factors' broader mission: to give practitioners scientifically grounded, practical tools that translate assessment data into outcomes clients can act on. Most Holland-based instruments tell a client what they are drawn to and stop there. Career Path measures what will drain a client as a scored dimension alongside what attracts them, so the friction patterns that often drive career dissatisfaction surface in the data rather than relying on the practitioner to uncover them through conversation. For practitioners guiding career transitions, mid-career pivots, or first-time career exploration, that second dimension changes what the conversation can produce.

Career practitioners who use Holland-based instruments share a common experience. A client completes a career interest inventory, gets a three-letter code, reviews a list of matching occupations, and selects a path that aligns with the strongest interests. A year later, the client is back with the same problem in a different role. The work is interesting in the abstract, but the daily activities drain energy in ways nobody measured.

Interest is half of what determines whether a career choice holds up. The other half is friction. People rarely leave careers because they lost interest in what attracted them to the field; they often leave because too much of the daily work falls into activities, environments, or interaction patterns that exhaust them. That friction accumulates quietly, rarely surfaces in an interest score, and often goes unnamed until the client is already disengaged. For practitioners working with clients in transition, that gap shapes which careers get recommended, which clients return for another round of coaching, and whether the work produces durable outcomes.

"Career choices that fail rarely fail because of the interest data," said Mark Majors, PhD, developer of Career Path and a counseling psychologist with more than 25 years of experience in career assessment and psychometrics. "They fail because nobody surfaced what would drain the client before the decision was made. Career Path measures preference and avoidance as independent scores because the data shows they carry different information. A client can have moderate interest and moderate avoidance in the same area at the same time, and that is one of the most useful patterns a career practitioner can surface."

Career Path is a 93-item assessment that produces independent Preference and Avoidance scores across 11 Occupational Activity Groupings: Business/Management, Business/Financial, Digital Data, Mechanical, Scientific, Artistic, Social/Group Involvement, Home and Nature, Individual/Personal Service, Governmental Service, and Health and Medical. The OAGs describe clusters of tasks, activities, and environments rather than job titles, so the data reflects what daily work actually looks like.

A second layer of six Global Interest Areas produces a three-letter occupational code that correlates .78 to .82 with Holland's Self-Directed Search. The three-letter code connects directly to the O*NET database and the broader career exploration literature practitioners already use, which means switching to Career Path does not require abandoning the Holland framework. It adds a dimension to it.

Results are scored ipsatively, placing each finding within the individual's own profile rather than comparing the client to a population norm. For one-on-one career work, the personal pattern of relative preference and avoidance is more useful than how the client compares to a national sample.
The 14-page Career Exploration Profile delivers OAG descriptions, the full preference and avoidance profile, GIA results with the three-letter code, and an O*NET job title appendix. Clients access the report through the Participant Hub, where the Career Explorer module supports ongoing exploration tied to the three-letter code between sessions, and Evidentra^® extends the work where the practitioner has enabled it.

For an executive coach working with a senior leader weighing a lateral move, the avoidance data identifies which of the new role's daily activities will accumulate friction before the offer is accepted. For a career counselor working with a mid-career client who has hit a wall, the avoidance profile names what the client could not articulate, often surfacing the actual reason for disengagement within a single session. The data turns a conversation that traditionally relied on the practitioner's questions into one where the friction patterns are visible to both people from the start.

At the organizational level, Career Path supports talent development programs, internal mobility planning, and career pathing work that HR and L&D teams increasingly own. When career conversations rely only on interest data, recommendations tend toward familiar roles. When avoidance enters the picture, the conversations surface options the client would never have considered and rule out options that would have looked attractive on paper. Practitioners who combine Career Path with Career Signals™ to capture values and motivational skills can build career conversations that account for interests, friction, values, and skill energy in a single integrated process.

Practitioners who design career programs, run executive coaching practices, or guide internal talent development can review the Career Path methodology and sample report at corefactors.com. The career assessment education page provides a deeper look at how the Occupational Activity Groupings and Global Interest Areas work together, and how preference and avoidance scoring changes what a career conversation can produce.

Practitioners ready to start using Career Path can apply for a free Pro Account at pro.corefactors.com/apply. Authorized administration requires the Career Path Practitioner Foundation Training led by Mark Majors, PhD. To see how Career Path pairs with Career Signals for work that combines career interests with values and motivational skills, request a demo from the Core Factors team.

About Core Factors
Core Factors is a people-development platform for practitioners. Executive coaches, leadership coaches, OD consultants, HR and L&D professionals, and career practitioners use Core Factors to administer assessments, deliver a professional participant experience, reinforce development between sessions, and document outcomes through participant feedback and reporting.

The platform spans four assessment families: psychological type, emotional intelligence, career, and social dynamics. Type Discovery delivers the four-letter type code through a research-based approach grounded in Jungian theory. Type Elements adds 32 subscales and Personality Formation dimensions for precision coaching. Type Dynamics introduces psychological type through the eight cognitive processes the way Jung and Myers originally intended. EQ Accelerator^® supports emotional intelligence development across four quadrants. Social Dynamics delivers a four-style interaction framework grounded in the work of Marston, Bolton, and Merrill-Reid. Career Path and Career Signals™ cover career interests, avoidance, values, and motivational skills. Every assessment is delivered through a single Pro Account, accessed by participants through the Participant Hub, and supported by Evidentra^®, the platform's AI coach assistant.

Kris Kiler
Core Factors
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