Career tests for students

The assessment on this site is the same one an adult takes: sixty work activities, six interest areas, a ranked list of occupations. It is free, it needs no account, and nothing about it is a junior version.

What should be different is how you read the output. Interests stabilise through the late teens and twenties — they are less settled at fifteen than at twenty-five, and less settled at twenty-five than at forty. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to treat the result as a description of where you are now, and to expect it to move.

The useful question at this age is not "which job should I do". It is "which kinds of work should I go and look at". A ranked list is very good at the second question and poor at the first.

The most common mistake students make with a career test is treating a high-ranked occupation as a decision and everything else as eliminated. At an age when you have been exposed to perhaps twenty jobs — the ones your family do, the ones on television, the ones inside a school — that is backwards.

The Department of Labor rates around nine hundred occupations. Most people cannot name fifty. The value of the list is almost entirely in the ones you have never heard of, so the right move is to scroll past the familiar titles at the top and read the descriptions of the unfamiliar ones further down.

Ignore the job titles and read what the day contains. "Technologist" and "Analyst" and "Specialist" tell you nothing. The description tells you whether you would be alone or in a room with people, indoors or out, following a procedure or inventing one.

Every occupation carries a preparation level from one to five: how much education, training and experience it typically takes to enter. This matters more to a student than to anyone else, because it is the one number that translates directly into what to study.

The distribution below is computed from the rated occupations. Most work sits in the middle — some or medium preparation, not a doctorate — which is worth knowing if the picture you have of "a good career" is drawn mostly from the top end.

The bottom tier is empty, and that is the useful part. No rated occupation asks for little or no preparation: even the jobs usually described as unskilled expect something. There is no version of this list where you prepare for nothing, so the real question is which kind of preparation you would rather spend years on.

The questionnaire is the O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, published by the U.S. Department of Labor and reproduced here word for word under its Creative Commons licence. The item wording has not been altered, so the instrument a student takes here is the instrument as published.

There is no account, no email address and no class code, which means nothing about a student is collected or retained beyond the anonymous session that produces their own result. A student closes the tab and there is nothing left tied to them.

One caution worth stating to a class before they start: the instruction is to rate how much they would like to do each activity, ignoring how much education it needs and how much it pays. Students routinely answer the pay question instead without noticing, and the result is a profile of what they think they should want.

Pick three occupations from the list that you had not heard of before. Read the full description of each — not the title. Then find one person doing each job and ask them what the worst part of their week is.

That last question does more work than the entire test. People will describe the good parts of their job unprompted; the bad parts are what you cannot find out from a website, and they are what you will actually be living with.

If you cannot find someone, the next best thing is a day of work experience, and after that a long unglamorous video of somebody doing the job in real time. Anything that shows you the work rather than the career.