In this article an index is investigated which can express the
fit between a job profile and a personal profile, which both make use of
Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. The difficulties are (1)
that even though the same conceptual framework is used to describe both
the capabilities that functions/jobs need and the capabilities that
persons have, the two measurements are not exactly the same, and (2)
that the index must be able to indicate whether a person is possibly
underperforming, or might be overburdened by the
function. Other indexes, such as correlations, or common distance
measures provide parts of the answer, but in themselves destroy too much
information.
To illustrate the different steps, data are used from a small
set of profiles from well functioning mental health professionals from a
community mental health centre in the Netherlands and a job profile,
obtained from colleagues from another community mental health centre.
A method preserving the direction of the differences, based on
the Mahalanobis distance is developed in this paper, which expresses
over- as well as the underscoring of a personal profile in regard to the
job profile, as well as combining these in a single index that can be
used in statistical analyses. The method might be applicable to compare
other kinds of profiles to each other as well.