Career interest test

Your result is a ranking of eight areas of interest, with the three you liked most first. Under each area you see its average on the scale from 1 to 5, a bar, a line about what its activities have in common, and a sentence that puts your average into everyday words, from mostly disliked to mostly liked.

The ranking is within you. If you liked almost everything, your top area is simply the one you liked slightly more than the rest, and if you disliked almost everything, it is the one you disliked slightly less. When your eight averages lie close together, the result says so, because the order then means very little. Look at the averages and not only at the places: a first place with a high average is a strong interest, while a first place with a middling one is a mild preference.

We do not match you with job titles, and we do not say that an area predicts success or satisfaction in any career. Interests are one thing that people weigh when they think about work, next to their skills, their values, their circumstances and what is available to them. A ranking of interests is a good start for a conversation with yourself or with a careers adviser, and not an answer.

Beside the ranking, each area is placed roughly among 665 adults of a community in Oregon who rated the same activities in a published study^[1]. Their averages are in the table. They were older than most people choosing a career, so the result gives only one of five rough levels, never a share of people, and the ranking above comes from your answers alone. For erudition the printed average does not agree with the rest of the study's table, so that area is not placed.

The test is the Oregon Vocational Interest Scales, or ORVIS, by Pozzebon, Visser, Ashton, Lee and Goldberg^[1]. They published it in the Journal of Personality Assessment as a public-domain measure of vocational interests, and tested it in a large community sample and in a college sample. It is part of the International Personality Item Pool, whose items anyone may use for any purpose. We show the activities in the authors' own English words, in their order, with their five answers.

• Each area is the average of the activities that belong to it, and all activities count forwards: liking an activity raises its area.
• The eight areas are leadership, organization, altruism, creativity, analysis, production, adventure and erudition. The ORVIS has its own eight areas and does not use the six types of Holland's model, so this test gives no Holland code.
• You may leave out a few activities. An area that is left with too few answers is not scored, and the result says that it is left out of the ranking.
• Your answers are saved in this browser after each activity, and kept for a month if you stop. Once your result is saved, the unfinished sheet is deleted.
• If the answers came quicker than the activities can be read, or were all the same, the result is shown, and it says so in plain words.

Below are the activities, how they are scored, the licence and the paper, exactly as we use them.

• Leadership: leading and persuading people, selling, speaking in public and making decisions that matter.
• Organization: planning, budgets, records and keeping an office or a business running.
• Altruism: helping, teaching, caring for and counselling other people.
• Creativity: art, design, music, acting and writing.
• Analysis: science, maths, research, statistics and solving puzzles.
• Production: working with plants, animals, tools and machines, and building things.
• Adventure: sport, physical challenge, the outdoors and facing danger.
• Erudition: languages, books, words, writing and editing.

Every area is named after what its activities share, not after a kind of person. Someone with analysis first and adventure second is not a puzzle between two jobs: it is a person who likes both thinking things through and being outdoors, and the two can meet in many kinds of work.

The test asks how much you would like to do something, never how well you could do it. You can enjoy the idea of leading a company without having the skills, and you can be very good at record keeping without enjoying it. Both matter when you choose a direction, and this test only speaks to the first. If an activity is one you have never tried, answer as you imagine it, and expect your answer to change once you have.

Take your top three areas and look at the activities in each, then ask what kinds of work contain those activities in some form. Often the answer is wider than the job titles you already know: analysis and creativity meet in design and data work, altruism and organization in health and community services, production and adventure in the outdoors. Talk about the result with someone who knows you, or with a careers adviser, and take it again after a few months to see whether your order has moved.

An area can come out lower than you expected because only some of its activities appeal to you. Creativity, for example, includes performing, writing and design, and a person who loves drawing may not want to act on a stage. The average then sits in the middle. Read the activities in the list below the result to see what pulled an area down, and trust your own reading of them over the place the area ended up.