The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI)

Abstract

The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI) is a standardized, self-administered, and self-scored psychoeducational assessment engineered to systematically identify, categorize, and quantify personal, contextual, and instrumental impediments to vocational acquisition and workplace retention. Developed primarily by vocational psychologist Dr. John J. Liptak and popularized through vocational counseling imprints such as JIST Publishing, the instrument synthesizes early empirical investigations into structural and psychosocial obstacles faced by historically disadvantaged job seekers—drawing foundational impetus from the taxonomy formulated by Miller and Oetting (1977). Comprising 50 items rated along a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from 0 (“Of No Concern”) to 3 (“Of Great Concern”), the inventory yields diagnostic scores across five distinct, conceptually independent domains: (1) Personal and Financial, (2) Emotional and Physical, (3) Career Decision-Making and Planning, (4) Job-Seeking Knowledge, and (5) Training and Education.

Engineered for administration in both individual counseling and cohort-based workforce development interventions, the BESI provides an actionable, color-coded diagnostic profile that operationalizes subjective perceptions of employability friction. Despite its widespread clinical adoption across workforce training initiatives, vocational rehabilitation facilities, and post-secondary career transition programs, psychometric evaluations featured in the Mental Measurements Yearbook indicate variable internal consistency reliability across subscales (Cronbach’s coefficient alpha coefficients ranging between .55 and .82) and a recognized paucity of published confirmatory factor analytic and longitudinal criterion-related validity data. This academic review delivers an exhaustive psychometric deconstruction of the BESI, elucidating its theoretical foundations, structural dimensions, administrative mechanics, and contemporary empirical standing in vocational psychology.

Keywords

Barriers to Employment Success Inventory, BESI, vocational psychology, career counseling, employment barriers, employability assessment, workforce development, psychometrics, job search self-efficacy, Career Adapt-Abilities.

Authors

The primary author and developer of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory is John J. Liptak, Ed.D., an established vocational counselor, psychometrician, and prolific developer of psychoeducational and leisure assessment inventories. Dr. Liptak has served extensively in higher education career centers, military transitional facilities, and workforce development agencies, authoring dozens of diagnostic measures targeting career exploration, emotional intelligence, job search resilience, and life skills. The inventory was commercially manufactured, distributed, and maintained by JIST Publishing (historically JIST Works, Inc., later integrated under Paradigm Publishing and subsequent educational conglomerates), an institution renowned for specialized publications in workforce readiness, welfare-to-work interventions, and career transitional counseling.

Purpose

The fundamental objective of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI) is to illuminate both overt and latent constraints that impede an individual’s capacity to search for, obtain, successfully navigate, and sustainably maintain competitive employment. Traditional vocational assessments have historically placed disproportionate emphasis on an individual’s internal aptitude, crystallized cognitive abilities, and congruent vocational interests—epitomized by Holland’s RIASEC topology. However, such assessments often operate under the latent assumption of an unconstrained occupational arena, thereby ignoring the pervasive structural, environmental, financial, and psychological hurdles that disproportionately stifle marginalized, displaced, or under-resourced populations.

The BESI directly confronts this assessment gap by functioning as a targeted psychoeducational triage tool designed to achieve multiple applied and empirical endpoints:

• Systematic Diagnostic Triage: Disaggregating diffuse vocational frustration into discrete, manageable subdomains, thereby allowing both the job seeker and the vocational practitioner to discern whether employment deficits stem from technical skill obsolescence, instrumental logistics (e.g., lack of transportation or dependent care), or affective self-regulatory difficulties.
• Facilitation of Intake Interviews: Streamlining clinical and vocational intake procedures within municipal workforce centers, welfare-to-work pipelines (such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families [TANF]), adult basic education (ABE) initiatives, and vocational rehabilitation services by delivering immediate, graphically intuitive self-scored feedback.
• Targeted Intervention Mapping: Directly linking elevated barrier scores to actionable remedial prescriptions, including referrals to legal aid (for background expungement), social service subsidies (for childcare or medical care), cognitive-behavioral counseling (for workplace anxiety), or career search workshops (for resume generation and interviewing competencies).
• Longitudinal Outcome Monitoring: Serving as a pre- and post-intervention benchmarking instrument to evaluate whether structured workforce readiness curricula successfully alleviate perceived barriers and cultivate career self-efficacy over time.

Psychological Construct

The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory measures the overarching construct of Perceived Employment Barriers, conceptualized as a multi-dimensional constellation of external environmental hurdles, instrumental deficits, cognitive career indecision, and psychological vulnerabilities that inhibit labor market participation. Rather than conceptualizing employability as a static individual trait, the construct embodies a dynamic transaction between the individual’s internal agency and their external systemic context. The 50 items of the inventory are partitioned equally across five distinct subscales, each containing 10 items evaluated along an ordinal continuum of perceived gravity:

1. Personal and Financial Barriers

This subscale assesses the pragmatic, economic, and logistical liabilities that structurally constrain vocational engagement. Items evaluate acute life-management deficits, including chronic financial distress, unmanageable debt, lack of reliable or independent transportation, absence of affordable childcare or eldercare infrastructure, housing instability or homelessness, and restrictive family obligations. Within this domain, employment failure is understood not as an individual motivational deficit, but as a consequence of competing socio-economic survival imperatives.

2. Emotional and Physical Barriers

This domain captures the somatic, affective, and psychological vulnerabilities that compromise an individual’s stamina, occupational presentation, and sustained interpersonal workplace functioning. The subscale examines conditions such as chronic physical illness, physical disabilities, unaddressed mental health disorders (notably clinical depression and general anxiety), somatic manifestations of chronic stress, low self-esteem, substance abuse histories, and lingering criminal justice or legal entanglements that elicit stigmatization and acute interview apprehension.

3. Career Decision-Making and Planning Barriers

Anchored in cognitive career theories, this subscale measures internal impediments associated with developmental career maturity, vocational identity crystallization, and directional planning. Assessed constructs include pervasive career indecision, inadequate self-knowledge regarding personal values and transferable skills, lack of awareness regarding educational pathways, externalized locus of control regarding career trajectories, and paralyzing ambivalence concerning long-term vocational goal setting.

4. Job-Seeking Knowledge Barriers

This subscale evaluates tactical, instrumental, and strategic knowledge deficits specific to the mechanics of contemporary labor market navigation. It examines operational gaps such as an inability to generate professional, error-free resumes and cover letters; limited comprehension of how to locate and exploit the “hidden job market”; deficits in oral communication, self-presentation, and interview navigation; absence of professional networking systems; and unrefined post-interview follow-up protocols.

5. Training and Education Barriers

The final subscale operationalizes deficits related to formal human capital, credentialing, and foundational academic competencies. Items target acute educational shortfalls, including lack of a high school diploma or equivalent (GED), literacy and numeracy limitations, obsolete occupational skill sets, unfamiliarity with emergent workplace technologies or computer literacy demands, and a lack of the specialized licensing, certifications, or formal apprenticeships required for competitive labor market entry.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual infrastructure of the BESI rests at the intersection of several influential models within vocational psychology, occupational sociology, and social-cognitive theory. Foremost among its historical forebears is the pioneering work of Miller and Oetting (1977), who investigated the systemic obstacles faced by structurally disadvantaged and culturally diverse job seekers. Miller and Oetting generated an empirical taxonomy of 37 discrete vocational barriers, categorizing them into four major clusters alongside discrete idiosyncratic variables. Their work shifted the vocational paradigm from an exclusively intrapsychic deficit model (which frequently pathologized marginalized workers) to a model that explicitly incorporated structural, institutional, and environmental constraints.

From a modern psychological vantage, the BESI aligns closely with Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), formulated by Lent, Brown, and Hackett (1994, 2000). SCCT posits that career interests, choices, and performances are governed by the triadic reciprocal interaction of self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and contextual affordances (distal and proximal environmental influences). In the SCCT architecture, perceived barriers act as critical contextual moderators that can decouple vocational interests from actual career choice actions:

Perceived Contextual Barriers → Decreased Self-Efficacy → Truncated Career Aspirations & Avoidant Search Behaviors

When an individual perceives severe barriers—whether accurate structural realities (such as a lack of public transit) or internalized cognitive appraisals (such as anticipation of rejection due to age or race)—their career decision-making self-efficacy collapses. Consequently, the individual self-selects out of the labor market or prematurely terminates their job search efforts. By making these implicit barriers explicit, the BESI allows interventions to target both objective environmental problem-solving and the cognitive reappraisal of perceived limitations.

Furthermore, the instrument interfaces with Career Construction Theory and the construct of Career Adaptability championed by Mark Savickas (2005). Savickas conceptualizes career adaptability as a psychosocial construct denoting an individual’s readiness and resources for coping with current and anticipated occupational transitions, developmental tasks, and work traumas. High scores across the BESI subscales delineate systemic compromises to an individual’s adaptive capacities (specifically within the dimensions of Concern, Control, Curiosity, and Confidence), thereby highlighting targets for targeted vocational reconstruction.

Validity

Evaluations of the psychometric properties of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory by independent assessment scholars—most notably reviews compiled in the Mental Measurements Yearbook by psychometricians Walter Camara and Kathy Green—reveal a complex profile marked by robust face validity but critical gaps in formal empirical and construct-related validation.

Content and Face Validity

The BESI demonstrates exceptional face validity and strong content validity. The inventory’s developmental lineage began with a preliminary pool of 100 candidate items extrapolated from Miller and Oetting’s (1977) foundational taxonomies, extensive reviews of contemporary adult workforce literature, and qualitative intake interviews with long-term unemployed individuals and vocational rehabilitation clients. These 100 items were subsequently subjected to expert review by practicing career counselors and vocational development specialists, who evaluated each item for conceptual clarity, reading level appropriateness, and construct fidelity.

This process pruned the pool to approximately 75 items across five theoretical categories, with redundant, ambiguous, or conceptually conflated items discarded. However, independent reviewers have highlighted an absence of detailed documentation regarding the precise empirical or statistical rationale utilized to winnow the intermediate 75-item pool down to the final 50 items (10 per scale).

Construct and Discriminant Validity

The manual provides modest construct-related validity evidence, largely relying on intuitive inter-scale correlations and theoretical coherence rather than comprehensive multi-trait multi-method matrices. While each of the five subscales addresses distinct thematic content, moderate-to-high intercorrelations often emerge in practice between the Career Decision-Making and Planning and Job-Seeking Knowledge subscales, as well as between the Personal/Financial and Emotional/Physical domains. This suggests that the experience of severe socioeconomic marginalization frequently produces overlapping clusters of distress rather than completely isolated barrier typologies.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The most acute psychometric limitation of the BESI is the lack of published, longitudinal predictive validity studies. The test publisher provides minimal empirical evidence confirming that elevated barrier scores reliably predict lower rates of job acquisition, decreased post-placement wage earnings, or accelerated rates of workplace termination. Similarly, controlled intervention research systematically tracking whether specific reductions in BESI subscale scores directly correlate with successful, sustained job placement remains sparse in the peer-reviewed literature. Thus, while the instrument functions effectively as a structured, qualitative counseling heuristic, practitioners are cautioned against utilizing BESI cutoff scores for high-stakes screening or exclusionary classification decisions.

Reliability

The empirical assessment of the BESI’s internal consistency reliability is anchored in data derived from an initial normative validation cohort of 245 adults enrolled across government-sponsored workforce development, vocational training, and sales trainee programs.

Internal consistency, quantified via Cronbach’s coefficient alpha (α), demonstrates substantial variance across the five respective subscales:

• Overall Alpha Range: Observed coefficients across the five subscales range from a low of α = .55 to an acceptable peak of α = .82.
• High-Performing Subscales: The Job-Seeking Knowledge and Training and Education subscales consistently demonstrate the highest internal consistency (typically clustering between α = .78 and .82), reflecting homogenous, concrete behavioral task content (e.g., resume writing, software fluency, interview technique).
• Low-Performing Subscales: The Personal and Financial and Emotional and Physical subscales exhibit weaker internal consistency (frequently falling between α = .55 and .68). Psychometrically, this attenuation is expected; these subscales aggregate heterogeneous life problems into single omnibus scales (e.g., an individual experiencing acute childcare hurdles may not necessarily suffer from chronic debt or transportation deficits, artificially depressing item intercorrelations).

Data concerning stability over time (test-retest reliability) are conspicuously absent from the primary technical documentation. Given that structural barriers such as sudden vehicular breakdown or housing eviction can fluctuate dynamically, the temporal stability of the measure remains an unquantified empirical question requiring ongoing investigation.

Factor Analysis

Although the BESI is organized into a balanced five-factor structural architecture (5 subscales containing exactly 10 items each), the published test manual lacks rigorous empirical validation via modern Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) or Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

The allocation of items across the five domains was executed through rational-empirical and content-based sorting methodologies conducted by expert counselor panels rather than derived mathematically via principal axis factoring or structural equation modeling. In independent critiques, psychometricians have noted that if a rigorous CFA were fitted to the 50 items—evaluating global fit indices such as the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA):

• A pure orthogonal five-factor model would likely demonstrate poor fit due to pervasive cross-loadings across complex systemic barriers (e.g., a criminal record item inevitably loads simultaneously onto Emotional/Physical, Personal/Financial, and Job-Seeking Knowledge).
• A hierarchical or bifactor structure—featuring a dominant general factor of “Overall Perceived Marginalization / Employment Vulnerability” alongside specific group factors—would likely provide a more accurate representation of the underlying data structure.
• Empirical research across comparable workforce barrier measures routinely identifies that logistical hurdles, affective vulnerabilities, and technical job-search knowledge coalesce into broader, higher-order latent constructs.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational and administrative parameters of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory are structured as follows:

• Instrument Designation: Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI).
• Target Population: Adolescents, transition-age youth, and adults (minimum 8th-grade reading comprehension level); particularly suited for long-term unemployed individuals, displaced homemakers, dislocated workers, re-entering citizens, and vocational rehabilitation candidates.
• Administration Mode: Self-administered; available in paper-and-pencil consumable booklet format or digitized online assessment interface. Can be conducted individually or within large group testing sessions.
• Completion Duration: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Total Item Count: 50 items, divided evenly into five 10-item subscales.
• Item Format & Response Metric: 4-point Likert-type scale scored as:
• 0 = Of No Concern
• 1 = Of Little Concern
• 2 = Of Some Concern
• 3 = Of Great Concern
• Scoring Architecture: The paper booklet incorporates an integrated, color-coded self-scoring carbonless grid. The respondent sums the numerical values assigned to each color band, transferring raw sums directly to corresponding summary profiles.
• Subscale Score Range: Raw scores for each of the five subscales range from 0 to 30. An omnibus aggregate barrier score ranges from 0 to 150.
• Interpretive Stratification: Elevated subscale scores denote acute operational friction requiring targeted remedial action. Profiles provide immediate visual comparison, indicating whether an individual’s primary barrier cluster is environmental, psychological, developmental, strategic, or educational.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Barriers to Employment Success Inventory was initially conceptualized and authored in the mid-1990s, with formal copyright secured by Dr. John J. Liptak and published commercially by JIST Works, Inc. (subsequently releasing revised editions, including the widespread Second Edition published in 2001 and subsequent distributions under Paradigm Education Solutions / JIST Career Solutions).

The BESI is a proprietary, copyrighted commercial psychological instrument. It is not available in the public domain and cannot be legally reproduced, photocopied, digitized, or integrated into electronic health records or learning management systems without the express written authorization of the copyright holder or publisher. Assessment booklets, scoring guides, and interpretive administrators’ manuals are available for commercial purchase per-package (typically sold in multi-packs for vocational cohorts). Researchers seeking to deploy the BESI within academic investigations must obtain formal copyright clearance and licensing permissions directly from the publisher.

References

The academic, historical, and psychometric documentation governing the BESI and the theoretical evaluation of employment barriers encompasses the following primary sources:

• Camara, W. J. (2005). Review of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory, Second Edition. In R. A. Spies & B. S. Plake (Eds.), The Sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook (pp. 110–112). Buros Institute of Mental Measurements.
• Green, K. E. (2005). Review of the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory, Second Edition. In R. A. Spies & B. S. Plake (Eds.), The Sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook (pp. 112–114). Buros Institute of Mental Measurements.
• 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. (2001). Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI): Administrator’s guide (2nd ed.). JIST Publishing.
• 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.2164-4918.1977.tb05273.x
• Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counseling: Putting theory and research to work (pp. 42–70). John Wiley & Sons.
• Swanson, J. L., & Woitke, M. B. (1997). Theory into practice in career assessment for women: Assessment and interventions regarding career barriers. Journal of Career Assessment, 5(4), 443–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/106907279700500405

Items of the Scale