Bette Noble has been developing and enhancing Crown Financial Ministries’ Career Direct® Complete Guidance System for 13 years. Career Direct has had O*NET in it ever since O*NET was available. In fact, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles was part of the Career Direct system before SOC Codes and O*NET existed! Crown Financial Ministries teaches “biblical stewardship, providing hope, help, and insight on how to make and manage money while fulfilling the spiritual purpose for one’s life,” Bette explains. In the early 90s the organization realized that many people they worked with were “not in a career that fit them,” describes Bette. “About 15 years ago Larry Burkett formed a team within the organization to help constituents understand how they are gifted and to direct them to occupations and college majors that matched their talents,” she continues. In 1995, they brought psychologist and mathematician Bette on board, and she has been lead researcher and developer of the guidance system through the initial paper version, a CD-ROM program, and then, three years ago, the easy-to-use, online Career Direct.

“Career Direct examines four essential components of career selection: personality, skills and abilities, interests, and work/life-related values. From the beginning, we were committed to making an assessment that the user completes in an hour. That was a challenging requirement. Imperative for us was doing all the needed psychometric work, ensuring the validity and reliability of everything that went into our comprehensive service,” emphasizes Bette. “O*NET fit perfectly with the work we had done. It was solid, sound, reliable, and valid.

“When Career Direct was on paper and CD-ROM, we encouraged constituents to look up appropriate occupations in O*NET, after they had their assessment results. But when Career Direct came online three years ago, we could link to the O*NET database directly from the person’s report! I showed our IT contributors that we needed to integrate O*NET with our service. And, since many of our constituents have job titles with a religious element, we also needed to create a sort of code connector, tables translating religious job titles to the closest O*NET occupations,” Bette relates. This is similar to using the O*NET Code Connector between MOC (the Military Occupational Code) codes and O*NET occupational codes.

“We know that before our guidance system was integrated with O*NET, many users did not follow through and explore occupations, as we recommended. But since O*NET has been integrated into Career Direct, we can verify that many more people do indeed click into O*NET, via the link from their reports,” Bette reports. “We have what we worked hard to achieve—a self-administered, all-in-one-hour, personality, skills and abilities, interests and work/life values guidance system. AND it guides the user directly into exploring occupations that most closely align with the person’s given talents and personal goals.”

Crown Financial Ministries’ constituents certainly appreciate the Career Direct Guidance System. More than 120,000 have taken the assessment. Many Christian secondary schools and colleges provide the assessment system in their career guidance departments. Career Direct is a very popular asset that colleges use in working with freshmen during orientation. Liberty University, Cedarville University, Grove City College, Oral Roberts University, and other colleges require all of their students to work through Career Direct and then career exploration using O*NET.

Bette is excited about future applications of O*NET in Career Direct. “Right now we are planning development in other languages. Afrikaans with our South African ministry is first on our to-do list, and next is Spanish with our Latin America ministries.” You can sense Bette’s enthusiasm for integrating the Spanish O*NET database into Career Direct. “Yes, there is much pent-up demand for our comprehensive guidance system in Spanish. Good for O*NET!” she exclaims.

Bette is an excellent match for her work. She earned a B.S. in mathematics and psychology at Stetson University and an M.S. in industrial/organizational psychology at the University of Georgia. Bette has been a college instructor in both psychology and statistics departments. Bette gives her mind relaxation breaks as a Masters Swimmer, in the pool of Brenau University, a block from her office in Gainesville, Georgia.