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History

The Career Direct® Guidance System was developed out of a need for a comprehensive, biblically based assessment that would help people better understand their unique divine design and find the career or educational path that best matches their natural God-given strengths and abilities.

Larry Burkett, renowned Christian financial author and speaker, noted that, “During the years I was counseling families on their finances, I frequently observed people in career fields that didn't match their talents and abilities. It concerned me that so many people were not aware of their strengths and, therefore, were not being good stewards of their talents.”

Larry began praying that someone would develop a program that would help people understand their vocational bent and show them how to make the right career decisions from a biblical perspective. In 1989, he felt the Lord was leading Christian Financial Concepts, the organization he founded in 1976, to undertake this task.

In 1990 Larry began assembling a highly qualified team of individuals to set about the task of developing a biblically based yet psychometrically sound career assessment. The team, initially known as ‘Career Pathways,’ diligently researched other assessment tools on the market and found that virtually none of them reflected a biblical worldview. Also, they found that most were not comprehensive in nature, covering only one or two of the four areas that their research indicated were essential to a sound career decision making process--personality, interests, skills, and values.

Initially, the team used a combination of well-known assessments along with “feedback counselors” to provide career guidance while they conducted exhaustive research to develop their own assessment. In 1995, Christian Financial Concepts made its first debut of the Career Pathways Assessment® made up of the CPPI (Career Pathways Personality Inventory) and the ISVI (Interests, Skills, Values Inventory).

In 1996, Career Pathways changed its name to Life Pathways in order to better reflect the whole-life nature of all of its assessment and career resources.

In 1997, a revised version of the paper assessment was published and the name of the assessment was changed to Career Direct®. Since its creation, over 80,000 individuals have benefited from the insightful perspective that under girds all of the Career Direct Guidance System materials.

An extensive analysis of data from several thousand Career Direct clients was used to refine and revise the factors and scoring which were incorporated into the 1999 introduction of the CD-ROM version of Career Direct. This greatly enhanced product allowed the user to install, complete, score, and print the Career Direct on the user's home computer, reducing the time from assessment completion to receipt of assessment results from two weeks to a few minutes!

In September of 2000, Christian Financial Concepts and Crown Ministries merged and became Crown Financial Ministries. During the transition time following the merger, the ministry focused strictly on refining and consolidating its core financial mission and materials.

In March 2002, there was a renewed interest in the career ministry and in developing the Career Direct CD-ROM assessment into an Internet-based application. A number of the former Life Pathways’ staff were assembled and the career outreach was renamed Crown Career Resources. It became their quest to redesign Career Direct into a truly interactive, online experience.

This vision became a reality with the release of Career Direct®
Online in 2006.