After completing secondary school, he was employed as a foreign-language correspondent for an export firm, and later as an information clerk for the Prague Central Library.
These involved simple tests of the ability to identify the top-facing colour (either green or white) of randomly ordered and concealed cards.
[2] These experiments nonetheless continued, with increased security and complexity, for 10 years, drawing in investigators from the UK, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, and elsewhere; although the principal investigators were Joseph Gaither Pratt, then at the University of Virginia, and H. H. Jürgen Keil of the University of Tasmania.
Pratt and Keil shared the 1970 McDougall Award (from the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man) for their studies with Štěpánek, as published in 1969.
Štěpánek was never prevented from handling the materials, which opened many possibilities for him to find out information through tactile and other such means.