Catalina is a 45-year-old single mother with two teenage children. For the past 20 years she has worked as an accountant for a small company. In that role she has focused entirely on budgets, expenditures, cost analyses, and report writing. Her company was recently acquired by a much larger one, and she and everyone else in her department have been replaced by staff from that company. She has been terminated and given 3 months of severance pay. She has come to your office in a community-based counseling center to ask for help in deciding what to do next. In the first interview Catalina asks you to give her "one of those tests that tell you what to do." You temporarily bypass this request and ask her to describe her work over the past 20 years, indicating what she did and did not like about it. You learn that her primary dissatisfaction in her past job was that there was very little opportunity to interact with people. You also ask about her interest in getting additional education or training for the purpose of being able to enter an entirely different occupation. You learn that Catalina feels strongly that she cannot pursue more or different training at this time due to family responsibilities. You then return to the subject of her request to take one or more assessments. What do you decide to tell her? And if you decide to do an assessment, which do you choose, and why?
