Methodology
How this assessment is built
A career instrument that will not show its working is asking to be taken on trust. This page is that working: which frameworks it draws on, how the pieces combine, and what none of it can tell you.
The frameworks it draws on
The assessment is informed by established psychometric frameworks, each chosen for a different part of the question. None of them is used alone, because none of them answers a career question on its own.
- Holland’s RIASEC — 6 interest scales
- What kinds of work pull you, expressed as a three-letter interest code. Interests are the strongest of the signals here for the question people actually ask, which is which direction to move in rather than how able they are.
- Big Five (OCEAN) — 5 personality traits
- Built from the public-domain IPIP item pool. The Big Five is the model with the broadest research base behind it in personality psychology, which is precisely why it is here rather than a type-based alternative.
- Work values — 6, on the O*NET taxonomy
- What has to be true of a job for it to be worth doing to you — independence, security, recognition, service. Two people with identical interests and very different values belong in different roles.
- Reasoning aptitudes, separately timed
- Abstract, numerical, verbal, spatial and mechanical reasoning, each administered under its own time limit. These describe specific reasoning skills on a particular day. They are not an intelligence test and are never reported as one.
Response-quality checks
Because a result computed from careless answers is worse than no result.
Every submission runs through 6 checks — for straight-lining, inconsistency, implausibly fast answering and socially desirable responding, among others. Where a check fires, your report says so and tells you how to read the affected section, rather than quietly presenting a number that the answers do not support.
How the pieces are combined
Raw scores are converted to stanines against a reference sample, so a score means “compared with people answering the same form” rather than a bare percentage. Career matching then weighs interest congruence, values fit and the aptitudes a route genuinely demands. Every recommendation in the report carries the arithmetic that produced it: which of your scores drove it, and how heavily each one counted. If a recommendation cannot be explained numerically, it is not shown — that rule is enforced in code, not in a style guide.
What we are careful not to claim
This assessment is based on established frameworks. It is not itself a published, independently validated instrument, and we do not describe it as one. Our reference sample is growing, and norms are recomputed as it does. Where a figure is an estimate, the report labels it an estimate.
This is a career-guidance instrument. It is not a clinical or diagnostic tool. It does not measure intelligence, IQ, or a person’s worth. Its results are one input among several, and are intended to be interpreted with a trained counsellor.
See what it says about you
The assessment is free to take. Read the disclaimer first if you want to know its limits before you start.