Holland's RIASEC Hexagon: A Paradigm for Life and Work Decisions

The purpose of this book is to examine John Holland's theory of vocational personalities and work environments and extend it to other life decisions that involve effectively matching individuals with their life and work options. It is also intended to refresh the thinking of career counselors, advisors, managers, coaches, and others working in the area of life and career decision-making. We believe that many persons in education, psychology, and business are familiar with Holland's RIASEC theory, and this book explores it beyond the usual boundaries. Indeed, this book focuses on the RIASEC hexagon and theory alone as tools for improving career and life planning. In this way, we believe the theory and hexagon can be used in primary prevention, an intervention focused on the prevention of life/career decision difficulties for many people before they experience such problems. Primary prevention aims to decrease risk factors and increase protective factors in such decision-making. We view this book as a combination of things. First, it can be a refresher for some professionals and students who learned about Holland's RIASEC theory as part of their training and career preparation. It may extend earlier learning about vocational interests to other areas like educational, leisure, and relationship choices. Second, it may help parents, teachers, advisors, retirees, clergy, and students assist others in making good choices about options that match their interests and goals. All of the individuals that assist others in the tasks of career and life planning (e.g., human resource professionals, career counselors) can use this book to better assist clients and employees. In a nutshell, this book is both a lite tutorial for vocational counselors and organizational consultants, and a self-help resource for anyone making career/life decisions. Many of our decisions involve the pursuit of good matches for ourselves and our options, e.g., spouse/partner, job, college, friendships, organizations, teams, charities, political parties, and more. Holland's RIASEC paradigm provides a language, vocabulary, or lexicon that takes much of the guesswork out of this process, and it can be applied in many different match situations. We often use idioms to talk about "matches made in heaven," "meeting of the minds," "find one's match," "meet your match," "meet one's match," and this book helps us understand and enhance such matches using RIASEC theory.