The RIPA (Richards Interest Profile Assessment) was developed over many years of research, study, learning to program in several languages, and much hard work. The idea for the method used in the RIPA was born in the late 1970’s as I, Randall Richards, taught at Murray County High School in Chatsworth, GA. Students were torn about what they would do with their lives. Counselors spent most of their time with students on the college prep track and had little or no time to deal with students who just wanted to find a career they could be happy in after high school. I spent a lot of time talking with my students about career opportunities. I often talked to one of the counselors about the need for a simple interest assessment. He would refer to interest inventories that were on the market and tell me about them. In many cases, he had examples of the inventories. When I looked at them, I realized that most of my students would be no better off after using the inventories because there were words and names of occupations in the inventories with which my students were not familiar. On one assessment students were asked how much money they wanted to make. Of course, they all wanted to make over $100,000 per year and believed they would. The unfortunate thing was that the assessment immediately eliminated all occupations with salaries less than $100,000.
Over the years, I gained a reputation for counseling with students who were not going to college. It was not that these students were not smart enough to go to college. In many cases they simply wanted to work with their hands, or they wanted to talk to me about what was available outside our little town in northwest Georgia.
In 1983 our school was a recipient of an NCR Unix Tower with 16 workstations. A local college that provided classes in our high school building purchased the computer. Our Board of Education purchased the 18 terminals and prepared a room for the installation of the hardware. I was the only teacher who had a computer at home (a Commodore 64 with a 5.25 floppy drive) so the principal thought I was the logical person to teach computer classes in our school. He said, “Don’t worry, we will send you to a class.” I am still waiting for that class. I had to work hard to stay 30 minutes ahead of my students. In some cases, they knew far more than I would ever learn. But that experience changed the direction of my career. I began to learn about relational databases, some rudimentary programming, and saw an opportunity to marry these new skills with my desire to help students in their search for a fulfilling career.
In 1991 Virginia, my wife, and I started working on our master’s degrees at UGA. She was in Marketing Ed., and I was in Instructional Technology. We went to lunch one day with one of Virginia’s professors. He suggested that we should be planning to enter the doctoral program at UGA. He also suggested that every paper we had to write in our master’s programs should be centered around the subject on which we would like to do our doctoral research. That turned on a light bulb in my mind. I had already been working on the assessment by using a desktop program called “Toolbook”. I later used Visual Studio to do a Windows based version of the program. As Microsoft moved through various versions of Visual Studio, I had to learn new ways of programing. But then the use of Visual Studio along with a subscription to the Microsoft platform became prohibitively expensive. During the time I was working on this program I had also been working on a blog about my experiences in Vietnam. I was using WordPress for that project. I finally realized that I could use WordPress along with a database on MySQL to present my program. After many months of toil in the development of the platform on WordPress, I decided to call in a professional. QuickWebFix in Virginia Beach, VA has provided the finishing touches. Together, we have completed what I believe is the best tool to help people find the occupation that will be fulfilling and lead to a happy life. The present version is ready for the masses. We are hopeful that it will assist many people in their quest for a fulfilling career.
Dr. John Holland determined that there are six distinct areas of interest. These are: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. You can read about these by selecting them in the History and Literature section of the Research heading on the Home page.
Use the links in the menu at the top of this page or many other pages to access research we did on the subject of career development.
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