These comments should not be construed as an underestimation of the usefulness of the simple intellectual test as a preliminary precaution in engaging employees or in detecting extreme departures from the mode or average. The use of such tests in discovering such departures and variants as idiocy, imbecility and general stupidity has been amply justified by experience with them. But we are primarily concerned here with the determination of individual differences and qualifications within the large middle range of the curve of distribution. My conviction is that, in the case of the average individual, we must either:
1. Demonstrate that these important non-rational determinants of vocational aptitude and satisfaction correlate very, very closely with more strictly intellectual capacity;
2. Postpone the entire work of vocational guidance in these cases, on the basis of psychological examination, until that distant day when these characteristics can be approached by means of scales and norms; or
3. Otherwise guidance must rest, as it now largely does in democratic communities, on the broad knowledge of opportunity afforded by industrial and pre-vocational training, the encouragement of thorough and systematic self-scrutiny, and the method of repeated trials.
The first of these alternatives has scarcely been attempted; the second will probably not occur in our immediate generation; the third we have had always with us.
It is important to note that the employments here referred to are not "blind alley" occupations. They all offer possibilities of promotion and advancement which in the main are so open to competition that the individual inevitably tends to reach that level of responsibility, independence, opportunity and remuneration which his total equipment merits. It is also important that promotion or advancement by no means implies the continued use of the particular traits which distinguished the individual from his fellows on the lower levels of achievement. Thus the boy who enters business as a responsible clerk may often move on through the work of sales management, buying, general promotion, superintendency, and ultimate partnership. The capable artisan or mechanic may proceed from the work of general helper to that of special expert workman, foreman, superintendent, inspector, contractor, and commissioner of public works or postmaster general. Marked boyhood propensities for wood-work indicate neither that the lad is capable of moving through these very diverse steps of promotion, nor, on the other hand, that he must forever remain a journeyman or an expert workman.