Career Interest Test

A career interest test matches what you enjoy doing with the jobs that involve doing it. It does not ask what you are good at or what you studied. It asks whether you would enjoy repairing a bike, analysing data, designing a logo, coaching a team, pitching to investors or keeping a budget spreadsheet.

That is a surprisingly powerful question. People who enjoy the daily activities of their work tend to stay curious, keep learning and get better at it. People who do not are often fine on paper and quietly bored by Wednesday.

Ours is built on the RIASEC model, the six-interest framework used by careers advisers, with our own set of forty-eight activities.

Each letter of your code is one of six interests. Here is what each one means.

• Realistic (R): hands-on, practical work with tools, machines, materials or the outdoors. You would enjoy fixing an engine, building a dry-stone wall or wiring a house.
• Investigative (I): working out how things work. You would enjoy running experiments, finding a hidden pattern in data or researching the causes of a disease.
• Artistic (A): making and expressing things. You would enjoy writing a short story, composing music, editing a film or designing a room.
• Social (S): helping, teaching and looking after people. You would enjoy teaching a child to read, training new staff or supporting someone through a hard time.
• Enterprising (E): leading, persuading and making things happen. You would enjoy starting a business, negotiating a deal or running a campaign.
• Conventional (C): organising information and keeping things accurate. You would enjoy managing a budget, building a filing system or checking documents for errors.

Most people have a clear top three, and the order matters.

Your code is your three strongest interests, in order. The first letter is the core of what you enjoy. The second and third shape how you like to do it.

Take two people who both lead with Social. An SAE might thrive teaching drama or running community arts projects. An SCE might thrive managing a GP surgery or running training for a large team. Same heart, different setting.

If your scores are all close together, your result says you have a flat profile. That means you enjoy a wide range of work and the activities themselves matter less to you than the people, pay or purpose. It is a useful finding in its own right: you have more options than most.

Every interest points to a family of jobs. These are typical examples, and your own list blends your top three.

• Realistic: electrician, mechanic, carpenter, engineer, farmer, tree surgeon, lab technician. Work you can see and touch at the end of the day.
• Investigative: scientist, data analyst, doctor, researcher, software developer, pharmacist. Work where the puzzle is the point.
• Artistic: designer, writer, photographer, musician, architect, film editor. Work where you get to make something that did not exist before.
• Social: teacher, nurse, counsellor, social worker, coach, trainer. Work where the result is a person doing better.
• Enterprising: manager, founder, sales lead, lawyer, estate agent, campaigner. Work where you persuade, decide and lead.
• Conventional: accountant, payroll officer, auditor, logistics planner, administrator, analyst. Work where accuracy and order make everything else possible.

The most satisfying jobs often sit where two of your interests meet. An Investigative and Artistic mix suits user research or architecture. A Social and Enterprising mix suits running a school or a charity.

We use our own proprietary structure: eight activities for each of the six interests, forty-eight in all, each rated on how much you would enjoy it. Each interest score is the total of its eight ratings, and your code is the top three.

If two interests tie, the one with more top ratings wins. Your matched jobs come from comparing your full six-interest pattern with the interest profiles of hundreds of occupations, so the list reflects all six scores, not just your top letter. Where we have a sourced pay figure for a job, we show it.

It is as accurate as your ratings are honest about enjoyment. Rate each activity for how much you would like doing it, not whether you could, whether it pays well or whether you think you ought to.

Ignore your training. If you are an accountant who lights up at the idea of designing a logo, say so. The point of the test is to find the interests you have, including the ones your career so far has left out.

Your interests are among the steadiest things about you once you reach adulthood, which makes this a useful test at any stage: leaving school, choosing a degree, coming back to work or wondering at forty whether there is something better. Taking it again in a few years usually gives a very similar code, and that consistency is exactly what makes it worth planning around.

Treat your job list as a set of leads to explore, not a verdict. Pick two or three that surprise you and find out what a normal day involves. Ask someone who does that job what they spend most of their time on.

Your code is just as useful if you are staying put. A Conventional person in a creative team can volunteer for the planning. An Investigative person in sales can own the data. Small shifts toward your interests make an existing job far more satisfying.

Then take the work style quiz to see how you like to work, not just what you like to work on.