Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI)

The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI) is a self-scored and self-interpreted inventory. The BESI is designed to help individuals identify their major barriers to getting a job or succeeding in a job. The inventory was developed to reflect barriers or problems encountered by adults in seeking and maintaining employment. The publisher suggests the BESI will be especially useful for people preparing to look for a job, who have not found a job, or who are unable to keep a job. Counselors will increasingly need the ability to assess the special needs and barriers of groups such as women, immigrants, and racial and ethnic minorities as the workplace, society, and jobs change.

Administration

The BESI is a 50-item, paper-and-pencil or online assessment. The BESI is designed to be self-administered, self-scored, and self-interpreted. It can be used individually or in groups. The BESI takes about 10–15 minutes to complete. It is appropriate for teenagers and adults with at least an eighth-grade reading level.

Scales

The BESI contains 50 items, evenly divided among five scales that reflect different types of barriers:

• Training and Education
• Job Seeking
• Personal and Financial
• Emotional and Physical
• Career Decision-Making and Planning

Scoring

Items are rated on a 4-point scale (of no concern to of great concern). Responses are summed for items within a category, with higher scores indicating more concern with barriers. Color-coding is used to indicate which item response scores are to be summed and carries through from item response to scoring to score interpretation.

Interpretation

Examples relevant to core categories are listed, as are suggestions for overcoming barriers in each category. Test takers are instructed on how to compute and plot scores for each scale. Test takers are provided with some prompts to help them identify specific obstacles and ways to address them.

Development

The BESI author developed 100 items based on the work of Miller and Oetting (1977), a literature review, and consultation with employment and career counselors. Case studies, interviews with unemployed adults, and literature on job search programs were reviewed to develop inventory items. Professional counselors reviewed the 100 items for appropriateness, clarity, and category placement, reducing the item pool to approximately 75 items. It is unclear how the 75 items were reduced to the 50 items comprising the BESI. The statements were designed to be realistic and were based on an initial pool of 100 statements found in literature and input from employment and career counselors. Counselors then placed the statements into one of the five categories (scales), and the author then discarded statements that did not represent barriers to employment, reducing statements from 100 to 75.

Reliability

Some data are reported about the reliability and consistency of scores attained from a sample of adults in one government-sponsored training program.

Validity

There is no predictive validation evidence and minimal construct-related evidence reported for this instrument.

Commentary

The BESI scales and items were developed to reflect some of the concerns and barriers to finding and maintaining employment, primarily for less educated adults. The inventory appears relatively easy and efficient to complete, score, and interpret; however, interpretation may be problematic for some of the adults this instrument is designed to assist. At best, the inventory appears most useful as a structured interview or intake tool for vocational counselors who desire to have some information about clients before beginning training or providing services. Independent use by unemployed workers could be potentially harmful because no evidence helps determine generalizability across unemployed workers with different education, training, and other characteristics. The BESI seems useful for helping individuals identify major barriers to employment. The normative information is not supported, and suggestions for overcoming barriers are simplistic. The stated purpose of the BESI is to help individuals identify major barriers to employment, and the inventory seems useful for this purpose. The BESI is attractively packaged, easy to use, and easy to understand. Reliability is quite high, but empirical validity evidence is lacking. Evidence of criterion-related validity would greatly strengthen the inventory’s utility. Although a profile with normative implication is included, its development was not explained. Only one small-scale study was conducted to assess psychometric quality, though additional data were available at publication. Although five category scores are provided, no evidence supports the measure’s structure. As a tool to encourage people to start thinking about what keeps them from finding employment, the tool has face and content validity, is inexpensive, and provides immediate results. Suggestions for overcoming barriers are listed; however, these suggestions are simplistic and possibly impractical to implement without a counselor’s assistance.

References

• Camara, W. (1999). Review of the Barrier to Employment Success Inventory, Second Edition. In J. C. Impara & B. S. Plake (Eds.), The Sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook.
• Green, K. (1999). Review of the Barrier to Employment Success Inventory, Second Edition. In J. C. Impara & B. S. Plake (Eds.), The Sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook.