Strong Interest Inventory? They're designed for two different purposes. the SII matches your patterns of interests (would you rather pilot a plane or read a book, etc.) against the interests of 2,500 people in the representative sample who a) like their jobs and b) have been in the posiiton more than 3 years and c) perform typical duties of the job. You learn your general interest area (one of 6 empirical clusters of how jobs in the world of work relate to each other), occupational interests (broader categories like military, artist, etc) and then see how you match to 122 specific occupations.
Since there are over 14,000 jobs in the current Dept of Labor Dict. of Occ. Titles, the SII isn't meant to point you to exactly which job you should pursue. But if you're shown how to use the info, you can use your codes to compare your interests to all the jobs out there through databases like
O*NET OnLine
and figure out what really suits you best. You've got a standard language for what interests you. You can figure out which of the 6 themes suits you best from books like
What Color is Your Parachute or
LifeKeys and some websites, but you won't have the nitty gritty. What shouldn't happen is for a counselor to hand you SII results and say, "Guess you should be a dental hygienist" because it covers so few actual jobs.
Type instruments, on the other hand, rather than interests concentrate on your natural preferences for taking in information and making decisions. It can help you think through general work environments that fit you best and you can also look at occupational type tables to see which careers more/fewer people of your type self-select into. It has a lot of other uses too.
There are lots of tools and websites that use the same theory as the SII, Holland's Theory of Occupational Interests.