Career Interest Test (Holland Codes)

About this assessment

This is the O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, the career interest inventory published by the U.S. Department of Labor. You rate sixty work activities by how much you would like to do them — not by whether you could — and the answers score six interest areas from Holland's RIASEC model: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional. The three areas you score highest on form your Holland code, and that code is matched against the interest profiles the Department of Labor has recorded for over nine hundred occupations. What comes back is a ranked list of work whose day-to-day demands have the same shape as your answers. It measures what you are drawn to, not what you are good at — the two are different, and a career test that blurs them is worse than none.

What it measures

Realistic

Hands-on work with machines, materials, tools and living systems.

Investigative

Analysis, research and working out why something behaves as it does.

Artistic

Work where the form is undecided and part of the job is deciding it.

Social

Teaching, helping, advising — work whose result lands in a person.

Enterprising

Deciding, persuading, selling and carrying the risk of the outcome.

Conventional

Records, systems and procedures that have to come out right.