I am a career counselor. Can knowing a person's Signature Themes help me offer good advice?

Yes. However, a person's Signature Themes will never reveal the career he or she should choose. Successful police officers do not share exactly the same themes, nor do successful lawyers, teachers, or salespeople.

Instead, Signature Themes suggest the activities in which a person might excel and from which he or she might derive satisfaction. Signature Themes can be most useful in helping people sculpt their roles within a chosen field, whatever they happen to be. For example, you could encourage a lawyer with Woo (winning others over) among her Signature Themes to try the rainmaking side of the business, where her natural talent for building rapport would prove extremely valuable. Or you could encourage a teacher with Arranger as a Signature Theme to take on administrative responsibilities at school, to flex his natural talents for configuring schedules and planning.

Great career advice doesn't mean helping a person find the perfect job. That would imply that the perfect job is "out there" waiting to be discovered. Instead, the best careers are created, not discovered. Highly successful and fulfilled people know themselves so well that they are able to deliberately massage job responsibilities to play to their particular talents and strengths. In the end, the best career counseling begins with these questions: "Given your Signature Themes, what activities fit you best?" and "How can you craft your role so that you can be rewarded for these activities?" These questions might not help the person find the mythical "perfect job," but they might lead to self-discovery. The right career will follow.