What career is right for me?

It is free, and there is no account, no email address and no sign-up. You answer sixty questions, you get your results immediately, and nothing is required from you at any point to see them. Your result page is a private link you can bookmark or close and forget.

A Holland code is a three-letter summary of the kinds of work you are drawn to, taken from psychologist John Holland's model of six interest areas: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional. Someone who scores highest on Artistic, then Investigative, then Social has the code AIS.

The code is useful because occupations can be described the same way. The U.S. Department of Labor has recorded interest profiles for over nine hundred jobs, so a person's code and a job's code can be compared directly. That comparison is what this test does with your answers.

No, and no interest inventory does. This measures what kind of work appeals to you, which is a different thing from what you have the ability or the training to do. The two are related in practice — people tend to get better at what they are willing to keep doing — but they come apart often enough that treating one as the other is the main way a career test misleads someone.

An aptitude test measures ability. This is an interest inventory. If you want to know whether you could do a job, the list here is a starting point for finding out, not an answer.

Holland's six-area model has one of the longer research records in vocational psychology, and the structure it describes has been recovered repeatedly across decades of studies. What it predicts reasonably well is which kinds of work people find satisfying and stay in. What it does not predict is job performance, income, or whether any particular role will suit you.

The practical limits matter more than the statistics. This is a self-report questionnaire: it measures how you describe your preferences today, on a day when you happened to take it. Interests are stable over years, not fixed for life. And a ranked list of matches is a set of directions worth investigating, not a recommendation about your life.

The questions are, exactly. This uses the sixty work activities of 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. Nothing has been reworded, added or removed.

The occupation matching also uses the Department of Labor's own recorded interest profiles. What differs from the official tool is presentation: results here are ordered by a similarity score and spread across preparation levels, and the written interpretation is ours.

About eight minutes for sixty questions. There is nothing to read first and no setup. If you close the tab partway through, your answers are kept and you resume at the question you stopped on.

Only indirectly, and less well than an interest inventory does. Personality traits and career interests are correlated — openness tracks artistic and investigative interests, extraversion tracks enterprising and social ones — but the correlations are moderate, and one of the six interest areas, Realistic, has no dependable personality correlate at all.

If what you want to know is which kinds of work appeal to you, asking you directly about sixty work activities is a better instrument than inferring it from five trait scores. That is what this test does.