Concern for enhancing construct validity of vocational interest measures provides a focus for scale construction quite distinct from that derived from a criterion-referenced strategy: Construct-oriented measurement implies: (1) substantive definitions of dimensions; (2) concern for internal consistency reliability, as well as generalizability; (3) evaluation of structural relationships among items and scales; (4) suppression of response biases; (5) emphasis on minimum redundancy among scales; (6) evaluation of convergent and discriminant validity of scales and profiles; and (7) evaluation of criterion validity for configuration of scales and profiles, as well as single scales. A construct-oriented approach: (1) permits hypothesis testing regarding vocational interest constructs; (2) provides a firmer empirical foundation than do armchair methods for identifying general occupational themes; (3) allows vocational interest profiles of criterion groups to be clustered to identify more parsimonious typal dimensions; and (4) contributes to sex-fair counseling through construct measurement. These implications are illustrated with data from the development of the Jackson Vocational Interest Survey (JVIS) and from a study by Jackson, Holden, Locklin and Marks (1983) in which academic major groups based on the JVIS profiles of 10,134 students were clustered into 17 distinct sets. (Author/PN)