Eighteen questions about what you enjoy, what you are good at and how you like to work. You get a career path, the skills you are missing, and something to do about it.
What you walk away with
Your three-letter interest code
The shorthand careers advisers actually use, and what it says about the work that holds your attention.
A matched career, with the pay
Scored against your answers, linked to a full guide and a market salary midpoint.
The skills you are missing
Named, ranked, and each one with a first thing to do about it this month.
We are short of the career data the test scores against, so anything it told you would be close to a guess. Rather than do that, here are the two things that still work.
A career aptitude test measures which kinds of work hold your attention, then matches that pattern to occupations. This one scores six interest types – Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional – known as RIASEC or Holland Codes. Your top three letters are your code.
The six types were set out by the psychologist John Holland and remain the backbone of the US Department of Labor's own O*NET Interest Profiler, which uses them to describe more than 900 occupations. Almost nobody is a single type, which is why the code has three letters rather than one.
R · Realistic
You like work with a tangible output. Building it, fixing it, making it run beats talking about it.
Engineering, infrastructure, hands-on technical work
I · Investigative
You want to understand why before you act. The problem is more interesting to you than the answer.
Research, data, analysis, science
A · Artistic
You want room to make something that did not exist before, and you think taste is part of the job.
Design, writing, brand, content
S · Social
The work only counts if it helped someone. You read people quickly and you would rather teach than tell.
Teaching, coaching, support, people roles
E · Enterprising
You like the pitch, the deal and the decision. Ambiguity reads as opportunity rather than risk.
Sales, product, founding, management
C · Conventional
You make the mess orderly. Precision and a process that holds are satisfying to you, not tedious.
Operations, finance, programme management
Neither. This is an interest inventory, and the three measure genuinely different things. Which one you want depends on the question you are actually asking.
| Instrument | What it measures | Best question for it |
|---|---|---|
| This test (RIASEC) | What kind of work holds your attention, and what you say you are good at | Which careers should I look at? |
| Myers-Briggs (MBTI) | How you prefer to take in information and reach decisions | How do I tend to think and decide? |
| DISC | How you behave with other people at work | How should my team work with me? |
To be plain about it: the MBTI is a registered trademark of The Myers-Briggs Company and DISC assessments are published by others again. This is not either of them and it will not give you a four-letter type or a DISC profile. What the research does suggest is that interest fit predicts how satisfied people are in a job better than type does, which is why we score interests.
No black box. Every career in our catalogue carries a hand-set interest profile, a ranked list of the skills it needs, and a working style. Your answers are scored against every one of them out of 100, and the highest total wins.
60 of 100
Interest fit
How closely the shape of your interests matches the role. Dislikes count against.
25 of 100
Strength fit
How many of the role's ranked skills you claimed, weighted by how central each one is.
15 of 100
Working style
Structure, people, pace and scope, against how the job actually runs.
+5 bonus
What matters to you
A deliberately small nudge on top. It separates near-ties, it never overturns a real interest gap.
When the top three land within 4 points of each other we say so instead of picking a winner. Interest profiles are the same O*NET content model the US Department of Labor publishes; salary midpoints come from the same benchmarks as our career path pages, cross-checked against the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.
Scoring and role profiles last reviewed by the MentorCruise careers team.
A test narrows the list. It does not answer the question on its own, and anything that claims to is selling something. Here is how to get an honest answer out of it.
Take the testPick what you would actually enjoy on a Saturday, not what you think a good candidate would pick. The result is only as useful as the answers.
The dislikes matter as much as the likes. Without them everyone scores high on everything and no career stands out.
The code describes the kind of work that holds your attention. It applies to far more jobs than the one we name.
The recommended role is a direction. The named gaps are what you can start on this month, and they carry across several roles.
A test cannot tell you what a job feels like on a bad week. Take the result to someone who already does it and ask.
Career coaches who spend their week on exactly this question.
Yes. The whole test, your Holland code and your top career match are free with no account. We ask for an email only if you want the full ranking and the complete skill-gap plan.
No. Nothing is required to take the test or to see your top match.
About three minutes. Six steps, mostly tapping options.
A three-letter summary of the kinds of work that hold your attention, drawn from six interest types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional. It is the model behind most career aptitude tests, including the US Department of Labor's own O*NET Interest Profiler.
No. This is a RIASEC interest inventory. The MBTI is a registered trademark of The Myers-Briggs Company and measures something different: how you prefer to think and take in information, rather than what kind of work you are drawn to. Interest inventories tend to predict job satisfaction better than type indicators predict job fit.
No. DISC assessments describe behaviour styles at work, mostly for team communication. This test asks what work you want to spend your day on and matches it to careers. If you specifically need a DISC profile, this is not a substitute for one.
A personality test describes how you tend to behave. A career test asks what you are interested in and good at, then maps that onto jobs. The two overlap, but only one of them names a career.
Accurate enough to narrow a shortlist, not accurate enough to pick for you. Interest inventories are good at ruling directions out. Treat the result as a hypothesis and go test it against people who do the work.
It can tell you which kinds of work fit how you like to spend your attention. It cannot see your finances, your location, your visa situation or who will hire you. Those decide as much as fit does.
Look at your three-letter code rather than the job title. If the code reads right but the job is wrong, the catalogue is the limit, not you. If the code reads wrong, retake it and be harsher about what you would avoid.
Then we say so rather than picking one at random. A close spread usually means your interests are genuinely broad, which is worth knowing. That is a good conversation to have with a mentor.
Yes, and one of the questions asks exactly that. Career changers get a result framed around what transfers from the work you already do, rather than around starting from zero.
Each career in our catalogue lists the handful of skills it actually needs, ranked. Your gaps are the ones you did not claim in the strengths step. Nothing is inferred from your name, age or anything you did not tell us.
Some use assessments in hiring, but rarely this kind. Interest inventories are built for the person choosing, not for the company screening. Your result here is yours.
The same role benchmarks used across our career pages. They are market midpoints, so treat them as a range check rather than an offer you should expect.
We store the answers and the result anonymously so we can tell whether the test is recommending sensible things. Your email is attached only if you choose to unlock the full result.
That is the normal state of affairs, and it is a better conversation to have with a person than with a form. Tell a mentor where you are and they will tell you what they would do.
