HORIZON CYPRUS

The Horizon Cyprus - Professional Orientation Test is a broad psychometric tool designed to assess the professional interests of Cypriot students. Horizon Cyprus was originally developed in the Greek language, taking into account the Cypriot educational system. The test creators, after carefully studying the modern international and Greek psychometric scene with regard to professional interests, designed an entirely novel assessment tool, with the intent to cover certain flaws and weaknesses of the existing measures (incompatibility with the educational system, psychometric weaknesses, lack of theoretical framework, etc.) and also to satisfy, to the greatest extent possible, people’s continuous counseling needs for a detailed depiction of their professional interests.

The test consists of 190 simple questions that describe various professional activities, the answers to which do not require special knowledge. As a user, you will be asked to state, on a 6-point scale, the degree to which you would be interested in engaging professionally in each of these activities in the future. The questions adequately represent 38 Occupational Categories and the resulting 6 Professional Types they belong to. The platform will then produce a descending-order list of the university departments in Greece and Cyprus, as well as the scientific departments of foreign countries, depending on the degree of relevance of each department/scientific field to your stated professional interests. Horizon Cyprus will help you discover your professional interests and will then recommend the university faculties of Greece and Cyprus, as well as to scientific departments of foreign countries, that best meet your professional preferences.

Responsible for the development of the questionnaire is Dr. Georgia A. Koumoundourou, PhD in Professional Counseling from the University of Athens, holder of a Postgraduate Diploma in "Counseling and Professional Orientation" from the Faculty of Philosophy, Pedagogy & Psychology, and a graduate of the same Faculty of the University of Athens, with a major in Psychology. She is also responsible for the validation and standardization of the following assessment tools for use on the Greek population: 1) The Career Development Inventory-Australian Short Version (CDI-A-SF), Creed & Patton, 2004, 2) The Career Decision Making Difficulties Questionnaire, Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996, 3) The Emotional Quotient Inventory, Bar-On, 1998, 4) The Task Specific Occupational Self-Efficacy Scale (Form S), Osipow & Rooney, 1990. Furthermore, she oversees the development and standardization of the Professional Selection Characteristics Questionnaire (Koumoundourou & Kassotakis, 2007). In addition, she is an author and reviewer of scientific articles in European scientific journals (e.g. British Journal of Guidance and Counseling) and conferences. Her research interests include professional evaluation, professional maturity, professional self-efficacy, professional decision-and emotional intelligence. Finally, she is a member of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology and a member of the European Association of Psychological Assessment.