1. Abstract
The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI) is a widely utilized self-report psychometric instrument designed to identify, assess, and categorize multidimensional obstacles that hinder individuals from securing and maintaining gainful employment. Developed primarily by vocational psychologist John J. Liptak and grounded conceptually in the barrier assessment frameworks of Miller and Oetting (1977), the BESI serves as an intake, diagnostic, and career counseling inventory targeted at adult job seekers, displaced workers, individuals entering or re-entering the labor force, and participants in government-sponsored workforce development initiatives. The inventory comprises 50 self-administered items distributed symmetrically across five distinct 10-item subscales: (1) Training and Education, (2) Job Seeking, (3) Personal and Financial, (4) Emotional and Physical, and (5) Career Decision-Making and Planning.
Respondents evaluate each item using a 4-point Likert-type rating format assessing the degree of personal concern associated with each potential impediment, ranging from 1 (“Of No Concern”) to 4 (“Of Great Concern”). The assessment utilizes an integrated color-coded scoring mechanism enabling self-tabulation and immediate graphical profiling to stimulate self-reflection and collaborative intervention planning. While preliminary reliability analyses from localized occupational training samples exhibit adequate internal consistency coefficients (with subscale Cronbach’s alphas generally ranging between .78 and .89), independent psychometric reviews published in the Mental Measurements Yearbook (e.g., Camara, 1999; Green, 1999) underscore notable limitations regarding empirical criterion-related and predictive validity, an absence of extensive representative normative benchmarking, and a need for rigorous confirmatory factor analyses. Consequently, while the BESI demonstrates high face and content validity as a semi-structured counseling heuristic and psychoeducational intervention, psychometricians emphasize its integration within comprehensive, multi-method career development protocols rather than as an isolated predictive gatekeeper.
2. Keywords
Barriers to Employment Success Inventory, BESI, vocational assessment, career barriers, employment obstacles, career decision-making, workforce development, employability, self-efficacy, psychometrics.
3. Authors
The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory was developed by John J. Liptak, Ed.D., an author, counselor educator, and specialist in career assessment, clinical counseling, and adult vocational development. Dr. Liptak has authored and co-authored numerous self-administered inventories focusing on career transitions, job search readiness, stress management, and emotional intelligence in workplace contexts.
The instrument was initially published by JIST Works (later an imprint of Paradigm Publishing / EMC Publishing, LLC; subsequently associated with JIST Career Solutions, St. Paul, MN). Historically, JIST Works served as a major publisher of career exploration workbooks, occupational reference texts, and practical assessments designed for secondary education, community colleges, public workforce initiatives, correctional re-entry systems, and vocational rehabilitation agencies.
4. Purpose
The primary purpose of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory is to systematically surface and evaluate the explicit internal and external challenges that impede an individual’s capacity to obtain, adjust to, or retain meaningful employment. The operational design reflects the multifaceted realities of adult employment acquisition, recognizing that structural market dynamics, educational deficits, personal circumstances, psychological distress, and career indecision operate synergistically to depress occupational outcomes.
From an applied perspective, the BESI addresses critical intake and diagnostic objectives across several key sectors:
- Workforce Development and Public Training Programs: Case managers and employment specialists utilize the inventory during initial client intake within federally or municipally funded welfare-to-work, trade adjustment, and re-employment programs. Administering the assessment surfaces hidden structural needs (such as unstable childcare or transportation deficits) alongside skill gaps, enabling tailored wrap-around service coordination.
- Vocational Rehabilitation: Counselors working with individuals recovering from physical illness, managing chronic disabilities, or navigating psychiatric rehabilitation deploy the instrument to identify perceived medical, emotional, and self-efficacy barriers, allowing for targeted accommodations and individualized plans for employment (IPE).
- Adult Education and Career Transitions: Community colleges, adult basic education (ABE) centers, and career centers utilize the inventory with non-traditional students, displaced adult workers, immigrants, and historically marginalized populations to establish whether academic deficits, job-search deficiencies, or career indecision represent their primary point of friction.
- Correctional Re-Entry and Displaced Worker Initiatives: Ex-offenders and long-term unemployed individuals often encounter compounded institutional and psychological barriers; the BESI assists individuals in disaggregating diffuse feelings of defeat into actionable, domain-specific challenge areas.
The theoretical rationale of the inventory emphasizes empowerment through self-appraisal. Rather than relying on clinician-dominated diagnostics, the BESI is explicitly structured for rapid self-administration, color-coded self-scoring, and immediate self-interpretation. By converting abstract anxiety about job hunting into quantifiable subscale scores, the inventory helps test takers prioritize intervention strategies, generate personalized action plans, and actively engage in collaborative problem-solving with vocational practitioners.
5. Psychological Construct
The psychological construct underlying the BESI is perceived career and employment barriers—defined as internal psychological mechanisms, behavioral skill deficits, and external environmental constraints that an individual perceives as obstructing their career preparation, job attainment, or vocational maintenance. Rather than treating “unemployability” as a uniform state, the BESI operationalizes barriers as a multidimensional phenomenon spanning five distinct domains:
1. Training and Education
This subscale captures perceived structural and cognitive deficiencies related to formal qualifications, technical competence, and literacy. It encompasses concerns such as possessing insufficient education credentials (e.g., lack of a high school diploma or recognized degree), deficits in basic reading, mathematical, or language proficiencies, outdated computer skills, or an absence of specialized occupational certifications required by contemporary labor markets. Individuals scoring high in this domain perceive themselves as technically uncompetitive relative to market expectations.
2. Job Seeking
The Job Seeking dimension evaluates operational, strategic, and tactical deficits directly involved in the labor search process. The construct addresses tactical unfamiliarity with resume preparation, portfolio development, identifying hidden job leads, submitting professional digital applications, cold-contacting employers, and managing job interview anxiety. It reflects an operational performance gap: individuals may have adequate job skills but lack the practical marketing competence required to navigate the employment acquisition pipeline.
3. Personal and Financial
This scale operationalizes tangible socio-economic, logistical, and environmental constraints. Key facets measured include unreliable personal or public transportation, inadequate access to affordable childcare or dependent care, severe financial distress, housing instability, legal challenges, and lack of professional work attire or tools. This domain differentiates systemic socioeconomic disadvantage from intrinsic psychological or skill-based limitations.
4. Emotional and Physical
This subscale integrates both somatic limitations and psychological distress variables that disrupt sustained workplace functioning. It encompasses self-perceived barriers such as chronic physical health conditions, functional disabilities, persistent fatigue, substance use vulnerabilities, unmanaged stress, generalized clinical anxiety, depression, low frustration tolerance, and fears of interpersonal workplace conflict. High elevations indicate that somatic or affective vulnerabilities dominate the individual’s employment resistance.
5. Career Decision-Making and Planning
Grounding the instrument in vocational psychology, this construct measures developmental vocational maturity, self-concept crystallization, and goal-directed clarity. It assesses generalized career indecision, lack of self-awareness regarding personal interests, values, and aptitudes, ambivalence regarding occupational direction, and the absence of a structured long-term occupational trajectory. Individuals experiencing high distress in this domain often feel paralyzed by a lack of purposeful direction rather than practical logistical constraints.
6. Theoretical Framework
The conceptual architecture of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory synthesizes classical vocational barrier research with modern cognitive and social theories of career development. Most notably, the instrument’s operationalization traces back to the empirical and conceptual formulations of Miller and Oetting (1977), who investigated the structural and cultural barriers experienced by disadvantaged and minority job seekers. Miller and Oetting demonstrated that employment failure is rarely attributable to a solitary personality flaw; instead, it arises from an interactive matrix of institutional limitations, socioeconomic barriers, and psychological friction points.
Furthermore, the BESI aligns closely with the principles of Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994, 2000). SCCT posits that career choices, interest crystallization, and performance outcomes are mediated by three core cognitive mechanisms: self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and personal goals. Crucially, Lent and colleagues integrated contextual affordances—divided into distal developmental influences and proximal environmental barriers—into their career progression model:
- Distal Barriers: Historical educational deficits, socioeconomic deprivation, and generational barriers that restrict educational access and shape early self-efficacy beliefs (reflected in the BESI’s Training and Education and Personal and Financial scales).
- Proximal Barriers: Immediate, concurrent impediments encountered during active career transitions, such as acute transportation failures, active health challenges, discrimination, or immediate interview apprehension (reflected across the Job Seeking and Emotional and Physical scales).
According to SCCT, individuals often avoid pursuing viable vocational paths not because they lack intrinsic aptitude, but because their perceived barrier self-efficacy (coping efficacy) is compromised. When job seekers anticipate insurmountable external barriers, their outcome expectations become pessimistic, attenuating their motivation to persist through complex job-search routines. The BESI operates from this foundational cognitive assumption: by prompting explicit externalization and rating of subjective barriers, the tool provides the empirical baseline necessary for cognitive restructuring, coping efficacy enhancement, and targeted behavioral intervention.
7. Validity
The psychometric evaluation of the BESI reveals clear strengths in content-related design alongside notable empirical deficits in external and criterion-related validity, as documented across professional psychometric appraisals (e.g., Camara, 1999; Green, 1999):
Content and Face Validity
The content development of the BESI adhered to structured rational-operational procedures. An initial pool of approximately 100 barrier statements was generated through extensive reviews of the vocational literature, previous barrier inventories (principally Miller & Oetting, 1977), and qualitative semi-structured interviews with adult job seekers and professional employment counselors. A panel of experienced career counselors and employment specialists evaluated these items for linguistic clarity, cultural relevance, and categorical alignment across the five theoretical domains. Items failing to achieve consensus or demonstrating ambiguous thematic intent were eliminated, winnowing the pool to approximately 75 items, which was subsequently condensed into the final 50 items (10 per scale). Consequently, the BESI possesses high face validity, as test takers readily recognize the items as directly reflective of real-world employment hurdles.
Construct, Convergent, and Discriminant Validity
Empirical evidence supporting the structural construct validity of the BESI remains constrained. Minimal published data document formal convergent validity correlations with established psychological measures (such as the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale, the Beck Depression Inventory, or standardized adult literacy measures). Discriminant validity evidence is similarly sparse; there is insufficient data to establish whether the five scales adequately differentiate distinct cognitive-behavioral constructs or whether they collectively reflect a single generalized latent factor of “employment demoralization” or “socioeconomic vulnerability.”
Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity
A significant psychometric vulnerability of the BESI is the lack of longitudinal, predictive validation studies. Research has not rigorously demonstrated that individuals with high baseline scores on the Job Seeking or Training and Education scales exhibit significantly longer unemployment durations, lower job placement rates, or poorer post-placement job retention compared to lower-scoring peers. Independent evaluators in the Mental Measurements Yearbook have highlighted that the instrument functions primarily as a descriptive diagnostic intake checklist rather than an actuarially validated predictive instrument.
8. Reliability
Internal consistency and measurement reliability for the BESI have been evaluated across limited occupational training and adult education cohorts:
- Internal Consistency: Initial technical manuals and field assessments involving adult participants enrolled in government-sponsored vocational training programs reported moderate to high internal consistency coefficients. Cronbach’s alpha values across the five scales generally fell within acceptable to robust psychometric parameters, typically ranging between .78 and .89. The composite 50-item scale demonstrated high global internal consistency (alpha coefficients frequently exceeding .90), reflecting substantial shared variance among items addressing general life distress and career frustration.
- Test-Retest Stability: Comprehensive empirical data regarding test-retest reliability across meaningful temporal intervals (e.g., 2 weeks to 6 months) remain limited in the open literature. Given that employment barriers include both chronic, trait-like characteristics (e.g., permanent disabilities, historical educational deficits) and acute, state-dependent variables (e.g., sudden loss of transportation, acute interview anxiety), temporal stability would be expected to fluctuate significantly across specific subscales.
- Standard Error of Measurement (SEM): Due to limited published large-scale normative data, precisely bounded standard errors of measurement for diverse racial, ethnic, age, and disability sub-populations have not been systematically tabulated, suggesting that counselors must interpret small score fluctuations across scales with interpretive caution.
9. Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the BESI relies primarily on theoretical and rational assignment rather than rigorous empirical structural modeling:
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
Although the BESI provides five discrete subscale scores corresponding to its intended theoretical framework, extensive published exploratory factor analytic studies confirming a clean five-factor orthogonal or oblique solution are minimal. Psychometric reviewers (Green, 1999) have observed that several items within the Personal and Financial domain and the Emotional and Physical domain share substantial conceptual and statistical variance, indicating high potential for cross-loadings. Factorial examinations of analogous adult barrier checklists consistently identify substantial higher-order factor saturation, wherein a massive general “General Life Stress/Poverty” factor accounts for a dominant portion of the common variance.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
To date, there is a scarcity of published, peer-reviewed confirmatory factor analyses examining whether the hypothesized 5-factor model demonstrates superior fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] < .06) relative to competing unidimensional, hierarchical, or bifactor configurations. The formal structural independence of the 10-item dimensions remains empirically under-documented, reinforcing that the five scales should be interpreted as convenient practical heuristic clusters rather than statistically pristine latent traits.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
The operational and administrative parameters of the BESI are summarized below:
- Test Type: Standardized self-report inventory / vocational intake screening questionnaire.
- Target Population: Adolescents and adults (minimum 8th-grade reading level); designed especially for unemployed individuals, career changers, adult learners, and workforce development clients.
- Total Item Count: 50 items.
- Subscale Distribution: Exactly 10 items per scale across five operational categories:
- Training and Education (10 items)
- Job Seeking (10 items)
- Personal and Financial (10 items)
- Emotional and Physical (10 items)
- Career Decision-Making and Planning (10 items)
- Response Format: 4-point Likert-type rating scale:
- 1 = Of No Concern
- 2 = Of Little Concern
- 3 = Of Moderate Concern
- 4 = Of Great Concern
- Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
- Scoring Architecture: Color-coded paper-and-pencil scoring format (or digital equivalents). Responses corresponding to each domain are summed horizontally across dedicated rows or color tracks. Subscale scores range from 10 to 40 points per domain. Higher scores indicate elevated perceived distress, urgency, or operational friction in that category.
- Profile Interpretation: Test takers map their raw scores onto an integrated visual bar graph or profile grid. Elevated scores highlight primary target areas for intervention, directing clients to embedded self-help strategies, group counseling discussions, or targeted workforce agency referrals.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory was developed in the mid-1990s, with prominent editions published in 1995, 1999 (Second Edition), and subsequent revisions issued through JIST Publishing / Paradigm Publishing. The assessment is a proprietary, copyrighted commercial instrument.
The inventory is not available in the public domain and cannot be copied, duplicated, digitized, or integrated into software platforms without purchasing authorized scoring forms or securing formal licensing agreements from the copyright holder. Assessment booklets, comprehensive administrator guides, and package kits are commercially distributed through educational and vocational assessment publishers (e.g., JIST Career Solutions / Paradigm Publishing). Qualified researchers seeking to employ the BESI for empirical or academic investigations must contact the publisher to request written copyright permissions and educational research discounts.
12. 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. Buros Center for Testing.
- 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. Buros Center for Testing.
- Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (1994). Toward a unifying social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice, and performance. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 45(1), 79–122. https://doi.org/10.1006/jvbe.1994.1027
- Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D., & Hackett, G. (2000). Contextual supports and barriers to career choice: A social cognitive analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 47(1), 36–49. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.47.1.36
- Liptak, J. J. (1999). Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI) (2nd ed.). JIST Works.
- Miller, C. D., & Oetting, G. (1977). Barriers to employment and the disadvantaged. Journal of Employment Counseling, 14(2), 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1920.1977.tb00637.x
- Swanson, J. L., Daniels, K. K., & Tokar, D. M. (1996). Assessing perceptions of career-related barriers: The Career Barriers Inventory. Journal of Career Assessment, 4(2), 219–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/106907279600400207