Cochrane Psychology

Sharon Cochrane, M.Ed. provides the vocational testing component of Cochrane Psychological Services. She has a Master's degree in Counselling Psychology specializing in career counselling. She also has undergraduate degrees in Business Administration and Education.

As well as extensive experience working as a career consultant, she has corporate experience in public relations, marketing and human resources development.

The Three Pillars of a Fulfilling Career

Your career has a great influence on the nature and quality of your life. It can be a source of healthy challenge, sustained enthusiasm, personal fulfillment and economic security. Conversely, if you choose a career that is not a good fit for you, it can be a source of frustration and disappointment. How can you choose the career that is right for you? Once you've chosen the right career, how do you convert your choice into reality?

A fulfilling career rests on three suportive pillars. The first pillar of career fulfillment represents your aptitudes or abilities. Aptitudes are abilities such as verbal reasoning, numerical ability, abstract reasoning, mechanical reasoning, space relations and language usage. The Differential Aptitude Test is the most thoroughly researched instrument for reliably measuring your aptitudes. When you have a valid profile of your aptitudes you can turn to the second pillar of career fulfillment. This pillar represents the career types that interest and excite you. The Strong Vocational Interest Inventory and the Jackson Vocational Survey are the two most thoroughly researched measures of career interests.

If you have the aptitude for a particular career but you are not very interested in this career, you could be successful but you may not be fulfilled. On the other hand, if you have a strong interest in a career but minimal aptitude for this career, you will have to work very hard to do well and the continuous extra effort may erode your enjoyment. Ideally, you will use the information that you gain from professional measures of your aptitudes and interests to choose a career wherein you will enjoy both success and fulfillment.

Now you can turn to the third and most frequently overlooked pillar of career fulfillment. The strength of this pillar reflects your fundamental sense of worth, your self-confidence and your optimism about your career future. You will need sufficient confidence to complete your education, to market yourself to prospective employers and to succeed in your chosen career.

In some career articles, you are encouraged to aim high, dream big, accept risk, identify you goals, create the road map to your goals and persevere when the going gets tough. These are valuable guidelines but to effectively apply them, you have to be free from self-doubt, self-criticism and performance anxiety. Your self-worth and self-confidence greatly influence your perception of what it means to aim high, to have big dreams, to accept risks and to persevere. With a solid sense of self-worth you can indeed aim high and dream big because you are clear that if you fail at a task you are not a failure as a person.

We offer professionally sound tools and strategies to help you create your own reliable and lasting pillar of self-worth. With this third important pillar you can enjoy career fulfillment.

Career Counselling Assessments
We will provide professional assessments of your needs and we will help you enhance your self-awareness with formal and informal measures of your strengths, preferences, values and goals that can influence your career-choice. We use the following well-researched, valid and reliable tests.

The Jackson Vocational Interest Survey provides you with a profile of your interests that will help you choose a career that will be fulfilling for you. This instrument ranks the similarity between your interests and those of people successfully employed in 32 different job groups.

The Differential Aptitude Test measures your strengths in verbal and abstract reasoning, numerical ability, language usage, mechanical reasoning and space relations to help you choose a career that is compatible with your aptitudes.

By considering your interests and aptitudes, derived from the results of the above tests, your ambitions and your academic history, we can help you identify suitable career options. We also provide information regarding the best options for appropriate education and training.

Our source of career options is the National Occupational Classification which lists approximately 30,000 occupational titles used in the Canadian labour market.