What Kind of Work Actually Suits You?
The six interest types behind most career guidance in the world
This is the model underneath most serious career guidance, including the databases that governments use to classify occupations. It does not ask what you are good at or what personality you have - it asks what kinds of activity you are drawn to, which turns out to be a more stable thing than either. Interests settle in late adolescence and then barely move, which is why they are worth knowing.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about what you would enjoy doing, not about what you are qualified to do or what pays. Whether you could get the job is a separate question from whether you would like it.
What it measures
Six families of interest: Realistic, working with things; Investigative, working with ideas; Artistic, working with forms; Social, working with people; Enterprising, working through people; and Conventional, working with order. Nearly everyone has two or three that stand out, and the combination is more informative than the single highest one.
Based on: Holland's RIASEC model of vocational interests (Holland, 1959, 1997)
Possible results
R - Realistic
Working with things: tools, machines, materials, the outdoors.
I - Investigative
Working with ideas: analysing, researching, figuring out.
A - Artistic
Working with forms: creating, designing, expressing.
S - Social
Working with people: teaching, helping, caring for.
E - Enterprising
Working through people: persuading, leading, selling, starting.
C - Conventional
Working with order: organising, recording, verifying.
Common questions
Should I change career based on this?
Not on its own. Interest fit explains a modest share of how satisfied people are at work, and the things that explain more - a decent manager, control over your own time, colleagues you like, being paid properly - can all be true or false within the same job title. What this result is genuinely good for is narrowing a shortlist and explaining why a job that looked right on paper felt wrong.
What if my top two are opposites?
It is a real and slightly awkward profile, and it has a name - the six types sit on a circle, and interests on opposite sides of it rarely appear together in one job. Artistic with Conventional is the classic example. In practice people with this shape usually satisfy one at work and the other outside it, and they are unusually unhappy in roles that demand a bit of each and enough of neither.
Do interests change over a lifetime?
Less than most people expect. Vocational interests stabilise in the late teens and early twenties and are then among the more durable things about a person - more stable over decades than values or specific ambitions. That is the argument for taking a result like this seriously at twenty and the argument for not being surprised by it at fifty.
Sources
- Holland, J. L. (1997). Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments (3rd ed.). Psychological Assessment Resources.
- Tracey, T. J. G., & Rounds, J. (1993). Evaluating Holland's and Gati's vocational-interest models: A structural meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin.
- Tsabari, O., Tziner, A., & Meir, E. I. (2005). Updated meta-analysis on the relationship between congruence and satisfaction. Journal of Career Assessment.
An honest note The six-part structure itself holds up well - structural meta-analyses support the circular arrangement across large samples. What does not hold up is the promise usually attached to it. A 2005 meta-analysis of 26 studies covering over 6,500 people found that the match between your interests and your job correlates with job satisfaction at about .17, which is a real relationship and a small one. Interest fit is one ingredient; pay, management, autonomy, colleagues and workload together matter more. Two further limits worth knowing: the model fits US and European samples better than others, and the Realistic and Social scales in particular are entangled with what men and women are expected to want, so read a low score in either against your own experience rather than as a fact about you.