The O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form: 60 work activities, six interest areas, one Holland code.
60 questions across 6 scales, about 10 minutes|Published scoring key from O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, 60 items, not invented
Authors: National Center for O*NET Development, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration
Licence: O*NET career exploration tools are released for free use and redistribution; attribution to the National Center for O*NET Development is required.
Working with things rather than ideas or people: tools, machines, plants, animals, the outdoors.
High. You'd rather fix it than discuss it. Work that produces something physical and testable holds your attention; work that produces documents about work does not.
Low. Hands-on, equipment-centred work isn't where your interest sits. That says nothing about whether you'd be good at it.
Working with ideas and data: observing, researching, analysing, figuring out how something works.
High. An unexplained result is more interesting to you than a finished one. You'd rather be given a question than an instruction.
Low. Open-ended analysis for its own sake doesn't pull at you; you'd rather act on a conclusion than produce one.
Working with form and expression: creating, designing, performing, writing, composing.
High. You want room to make something that didn't exist and that carries your judgement. Rigid process feels like a cost rather than a support.
Low. Self-expression isn't what you want work to be for. Structure and a clear brief suit you better than a blank page.
Working with people in order to help them: teaching, advising, caring, training, serving.
High. Work feels worthwhile to you when someone is visibly better off because of it. You read people quickly and you don't find that draining.
Low. You'd rather the work speak for itself than spend the day in other people's problems.
Working with people in order to persuade or lead them: selling, managing, negotiating, starting things.
High. You're comfortable with risk, with deciding on partial information, and with being the one who has to convince the room.
Low. Persuasion and status competition don't motivate you, and you'd rather be judged on the work than on the pitch.
Working with data and process: organising, recording, checking, following a defined standard.
High. You like knowing what correct looks like. Clear rules, clean records and work that can be verified suit you.
Low. Routine and procedural accuracy are not where your interest lies. You'd rather define the system than run it.
Question 1 of 60
Would you like to do this activity?
Build kitchen cabinets
John Holland's contribution was deceptively simple. He argued that occupational interests fall into six broad types, that work environments can be described with the same six, and that satisfaction rises when the two line up. The hexagon that followed, running Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional, became the organising structure for most serious career guidance in the English-speaking world.
The instrument here is the O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, developed by the National Center for O*NET Development under the US Department of Labor. Sixty work activities, ten per interest area, each rated for how much you would like to do it. The whole O*NET career exploration suite is released for free use and redistribution.
Notice what the items are not asking. Nothing on the form mentions qualifications, salary or whether you would be any good at the activity. That omission is deliberate: the moment people start rating feasibility, an interest inventory stops measuring interest.
60 answers
Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.
6 scales
Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.
A band
Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.
Ten activities per interest area, each rated from Strongly dislike (0) to Strongly like (4), giving a raw score from 0 to 40 per area. Nothing is reverse-keyed. Your Holland code is the three highest-scoring areas in order; ties are broken alphabetically, so when two areas are close, treat the order as arbitrary.
Scoring runs in your browser from your own answers. It is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same result, and no part of it is generated, estimated or inferred.
The O*NET psychometric report for the paper-and-pencil Short Form gives internal consistency estimates ranging from .76 to .85, with a mean of .80, and notes these are comparable to the web Short Form (mean .81; Rounds, Su, Lewis & Rivkin, 2010).
Structural validity has been checked against Holland's circular model using randomisation tests of hypothesised order, multidimensional scaling and circular unidimensional scaling, the standard tools for asking whether the six types really sit in the predicted ring.
The honest limit is interpretive, not psychometric. Your Holland code depends on the gaps between your top scores. When the top three are within a point or two, the ordering carries almost no information, and treating ACE as meaningfully different from AEC would be reading noise.
Worth taking if
Not the right tool for
This measures interest, not ability and not aptitude. Liking an activity doesn't mean you'd be good at it, and the reverse is just as true.
No interest inventory can tell you which job to take. It narrows the field for exploration; it doesn't make the decision.
Interests shift with exposure. People who have never encountered a kind of work reliably under-rate it.
Your code depends on the gaps between scores. Where the top three are within a point or two of each other, the ordering carries almost no information.
This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.
60 questions, about 10 minutes. Your answers are scored on this device and stored on this device. There is no account to create and nothing is sent to a server. Progress saves as you go, so a long assessment can be finished across more than one sitting.
No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, 60 items, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.
Your three highest-scoring interest areas, in order, written as three letters. A code of ASE means Artistic first, Social second, Enterprising third. Occupations are coded the same way, which is what makes the two comparable.
Realistic (working with things), Investigative (working with ideas and data), Artistic (creating and expressing), Social (helping and teaching), Enterprising (persuading and leading) and Conventional (organising and checking).
The items are. All 60 work activities come from the official O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form published by the National Center for O*NET Development, in printed order. This site is not affiliated with O*NET or the Department of Labor.
No, and anything that claims to is overselling. It tells you which kinds of work environment tend to suit each interest area, which narrows where to look. The decision stays yours.
About ten minutes for 60 activities. There are no reverse-scored items and no trick questions. You simply rate how much each activity appeals.
Neither. It measures interest. Liking an activity does not mean you would be good at it, and being good at something does not mean you will enjoy a career of it.
All 60 activity statements extracted from the official paper-and-pencil instrument (Interest_Profiler.pdf) published at onetcenter.org, in printed order. The five-point Like scale matches the web Short Form. Check the source.