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Relationship between Aptitudes, Interests, and Skills

Research on the development of talent has long demonstrated that aptitudes are good predictors of the quality of adjustment of individuals to both work and leisure activities. To succeed in particular work settings and to gain the most out of leisure, however, one cannot rely only on raw undeveloped aptitudes. One has to develop specific skills. An extremely successful and talented individual in one field may share similar core aptitudes with another (similarly successful and talented) person in a quite different field, but these people may rely on entirely different skills that they have built on an identical set of aptitudes. Aptitudes tell you something about what sort of skill might be readily acquired, given sufficient training opportunities, but they are not sufficient to predict the precise sets of skills that individuals will ultimately develop.

Likewise, interests provide a direction to the development of one’s habits and activities. They are foundational for the development of skills, but in a different manner than aptitudes. Interests serve primarily to select, out of a mix of potential activities, the ones in which an individual will engage. The smoothest and surest means of developing skills lies in the intersection of aptitudes and interests: that set of activities for which an individual has both the raw native talent (aptitude) and the desire (interests).

In the absence of sufficient aptitude, even the strongest interest will be sufficient to move the individual forward only slowly in the acquisition of skill required for particular talent fields. Interest may be enough to satisfy any individual within leisure activities, but most employers will become impatient with a worker who habitually takes longer than others to master key responsibilities-regardless of how interested the employee is. Likewise, a person can have wonderful aptitudes, appropriate for all sorts of talent fields, but without sufficient interest, individuals will not devote the time and effort required to build skills on their foundations. This difference is why it is so important to have adequate information about one’s aptitudes and interests prior to making major investments of time, effort, and resources toward the development of talent in any field. Research using the Ball Aptitude Battery has shown that although aptitudes and interests are only minimally related to one another, both are closely related to the sorts of skills that individuals develop and the activities and jobs that people choose.