03/01/2026
When Intuition Sneaks into the Room: Should Career Development Professionals Trust Clients’ Intuition?
By Itamar Gati and Moshe Tatar
The Case of Claire
Claire is a 23-year-old economics graduate who has received two attractive job offers: one as an investment advisor and another as an analyst at a high-tech company. She approached the college career center and told Karen, her career development professional, that the investment position simply “feels right.” Karen now faces a familiar dilemma in career counseling: how much weight should be given to Claire’s intuition in making this decision?
Intuition, often called a gut feeling, is a sense of knowing without conscious reasoning (Epstein, 2010; Kahneman, 2002). It relies on knowledge acquired automatically, typically outside of conscious awareness, which may later surface as a rapid impression that often shapes judgments and decisions (Betsch, 2008). Whether in everyday matters or major life choices, intuition often guides the individual’s decisions, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly.
Intuition and a Framework for Career Decision Making
Gati and Asher (2001) introduced the PIC model – Prescreening, In-Depth Exploration, and Choice – as a framework for career decision making. The PIC model provides a systematic approach to gathering, analyzing, and integrating information. Krieshok (1998) argued that much of the information individuals process when considering career options does not reach conscious awareness, thereby allowing intuition to influence decision making. Accordingly, intuition may play a role at each stage of the PIC process.
Focusing on the Choice stage, researchers recently examined how well clients’ intuitive preferences align with the results of using the structured decision-making process, Compare & Choose (Gati et al., 2025). In the study, individuals choosing among a small set of promising career options used a free, online decision-support system that helped them rate how well each alternative matched what they wanted, valued, and felt able to do. Compare & Choose (C&C) then assigns an overall suitability score to each alternative as an indicator of its general fit.
The researchers were interested in whether clients’ gut feelings aligned with their overall suitability scores for each career option. To that end, they compared the clients’ shortlist of career options with the overall suitability score for each option. For the comparison, they used three ways intuition shows up in practice:
- Implicit intuition - which option the client happened to list first
- Explicit intuition - which option the client selected as the best fit intuitively when asked directly.
- Self-reported reliance on intuition - whether clients described themselves as people who generally trust their gut in career decisions.
Key Findings and Their Implications
Rather than treating intuition as right or wrong, the researchers examined how often these indicators of intuition aligned with the outcome of the structured comparison.
The compatibility between implicit and explicit intuitions and the outcomes of the C&C-based comparison among the finalist options is informative and has practical implications. Regarding implicit intuition, a majority of participants (59%, above chance level) listed the alternative that C&C later identified as most suitable first. This finding suggests that even an unprompted ordering of options may contain meaningful information. Accordingly, career development professionals may invite clients to articulate why that option was listed first.
With respect to explicit intuition, 74% of participants identified one alternative as their intuitive choice, and in 60% of these cases the selected option also emerged as the most suitable according to C&C. This suggests that a direct question such as, “Which option feels right?” can elicit immediate and often informative responses for many—though not all—individuals engaged in career decision making.
Finally, regarding the alignment between implicit and explicit intuitions and the C&C outcome, 44% of participants showed full alignment between both forms of intuition and the C&C outcome, while an additional 29% showed alignment only with explicit intuition. When implicit and explicit intuitions diverge, the C&C suitability scores can serve as a structured anchor for decision-making. Such structure may also be helpful when discrepancies arise between the client's intuitions and those of the career development professional.
Several additional meaningful patterns emerged:
- In many cases, the option clients listed first was subsequently identified by the structured comparison process as the strongest fit.
- When asked directly, most clients were able to identify a gut favorite, which often aligned with the results of Compare and Choose.
- Clients’ self-reports (e.g., “Yes, I use intuition in my career decisions”) indicate a general reliance on intuition but do not address the accuracy or practical value of those intuitions.
- Self-reported reliance on intuition was not associated with a greater likelihood that the intuitively preferred option aligned with the outcome of the structured comparison.
What This Means for Career Development Professionals
Intuitive choices clearly carry some information. They can provide an important starting point and open the door to meaningful conversation.
However, intuition can also be misleading. In the Gati et al. (2025) study, 40% of participants had the option they listed first or identified as most suitable based on intuition differ from the option identified as best in Compare & Choose (C&C), even though all information was provided by the same person. When intuition and C&C results agree, clients’ confidence in their decision is likely to increase. When they disagree, the difference provides an opportunity for career development professionals to help clients understand the reasons and, if needed, to encourage clients to adjust their inputs to C&C after exploring the options further.
These findings suggest that career development professionals should interpret clients’ gut feelings with caution and verify their intuition using structured decision-making tools such as Compare & Choose.
Responding to Claire’s Intuition
How should Karen respond to Claire’s intuition? With the right tools and approach, career development professionals are often better equipped than clients themselves to assess intuitive preferences. Intuitions, both implicit (e.g., list order) and explicit (e.g., “mark your gut choice”), can be valuable, but they need confirmation. Encouraging clients to articulate their intuitions openly and to compare them with the results of a structured decision-making tool such as C&C, can deepen their awareness of personal needs, aspirations, and abilities.
When the outcomes of the different approaches align, that alignment should be acknowledged and reinforced. When they differ, the discrepancy should be seen not as a warning or disqualification but as an invitation to deeper exploration. Through this process, career development professionals can leverage the client’s experiential insight and intuition while validating these impressions with the career decision-support system. Compare & Choose does not aim to replace intuition; instead, it should be regarded as a reliable professional safety net that can help provide clarity and reduce the likelihood of future regret.
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References
Betsch, T. (2008). The nature of intuition and its neglect in research on judgment and decision making. In H. Plessner, C. Betsch, & T. Betsch (Eds.), Intuition in judgment and decision making (pp. 3–22). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Epstein, S. (2010). Demystifying intuition: What it is, what it does, and how it does it. Psychological Inquiry, 21(4), 295–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2010.523875
Gati, I., & Asher, I. (2001). The PIC model for career decision making: Prescreening, in-depth exploration, and choice. In F. T. Leong & A. Barak (Eds.), Contemporary models in vocational psychology (pp. 7–54). Erlbaum.
Gati, I., Izrailevitch, V., & Tatar, M. (2025). Clients’ intuitions in career decision making: Should career counselors trust them? Journal of Career Assessment, 33(3), 549–568. https://doi.org/10.1177/10690727241287532
Kahneman, D. (2002). Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgment and choice. Nobel Prize Lecture, 8, 351–401.
Krieshok, T. S. (1998). An anti-introspectivist view of career decision making. The Career Development Quarterly, 46(3), 210–229. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-0045.1998.tb00697.x
Itamar Gati, PhD, is the Samuel and Esther Melton Professor (Emeritus) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an internationally recognized scholar in career decision-making across the lifespan. His work focuses on developing theoretical models and practical tools to help individuals make more informed and effective career and life decisions. He leads the team behind www.cddq.org, a free public service that supports better career decision-making. The site offers several assessments, including the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (used in 75 countries) and the Higher Education and Work Orientations questionnaires. Dr. Gati has served on the Editorial Board of the Career Development Quarterly and on the NCDA Research Committee. He is a Fellow of both the NCDA and the APA and a recipient of the NCDA Lifetime Achievement Award. In Israel, he has received the Landau Prize for Research in Education and the Kaye Innovation Awards. He can be reached at Itamar.gati@mail.huji.ac.il.
Moshe Tatar, PhD, is the Anna Lazarus Professor at the School of Education of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and previously served as the Seymour Fox Director of the School of Education. He has been appointed Honorary Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and received the Michael Milken Award for Continued Excellence in Teaching at the Hebrew University. During his graduate studies, he worked as a high school teacher and counselor. Dr. Tatar has held visiting appointments at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Complutense University of Madrid, and the University of Almería in Spain. His teaching and research focus on school counseling and psychology, multicultural education and counseling—particularly with immigrants and minority groups—and adolescents’ help-seeking behaviors and attitudes. He has published extensively in leading journals and has presented his work at more than 120 international workshops and conferences. He can be reached at moshe.tatar@mail.huji.ac.il.