The Career Interest Test

What are Holland codes?

Holland's central claim (1959, refined through 1997) is that both people and work environments can be described by six interest types — Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional — and that people flourish in environments that match their type pattern. Your top three types, in order, form your Holland code (an "AIS," a "REC"), a shorthand that career systems worldwide use to index occupations. The U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET database classifies every occupation it tracks by RIASEC code, which is what makes the code practically useful rather than just descriptive.

The six types are not arbitrary: they arrange around a hexagon in the order R–I–A–S–E–C, with adjacent types more psychologically similar than distant ones — a structure that has held up across decades of data and cultures (Rounds & Tracey 1996), even if the spacing is rarely perfectly regular. Nauta's (2010) review credits the model's endurance to exactly this combination: a simple typology, a testable geometry, and a direct bridge to real occupational data. The congruence claim — that person–environment fit predicts satisfaction and persistence — is supported but modest in effect size (Assouline & Meir 1987), which is why we frame your code as a compass, not a verdict.

The six types and their items.

Each type is measured with six items (36 total) describing kinds of work and working conditions, rated 0–10 purely on appeal. For readability the form presents the six types in three pairs following the hexagon order — a navigational grouping echoing Prediger's (1982) underlying Things–People and Data–Ideas dimensions, not a scored cluster: all six types are scored independently and weighted equally. Unlike our symptom-style instruments, there are no reverse-scored items: interest inventories rate appeal in one direction, and because your code is built from the ranking of the six scales, any general tendency to rate everything high or low inflates all six equally and largely cancels out of the code itself. All wording below is LBL-original.

How your Holland code is calculated.

The profile is built in four stages, and — like every LBL assessment — it recomputes live on every answer rather than at a final submit.

Stage 1 · Activity ratings

Each of the 36 activities is rated on a 0–10 appeal slider. There are no reverse-scored items (see above): because the code is derived from the ranking of the six type scores, a general tendency to rate everything generously or harshly lifts or lowers all six scales together and largely cancels out of the code.

Stage 2 · Type scores

Each RIASEC type is the mean of its six ratings, rescaled to 0–100. All six types are weighted equally — the hexagon has no privileged corner. These are the six values drawn on your hexagon and listed beside it.

Stage 3 · The three-letter code

Your Holland code is simply your three highest types, in descending order. Exact ties are broken by hexagon order (R–I–A–S–E–C) — a stated convention, not a psychological claim. Career-matching practice treats codes flexibly: an "ASI" should also explore "AIS" and "SAI" occupations.

Stage 4 · Profile metrics

Differentiation is how peaked your profile is — here computed as the gap between your highest and lowest type scores (an LBL simplification of Iachan's 1984 index), banded as Flat (0–14), Emerging (15–29), Defined (30–49), and Sharply defined (50+). A flat profile isn't a failure; it usually means interests are still consolidating or genuinely broad. Consistency is how close your top two letters sit on the hexagon: adjacent (high), one apart (moderate), or opposite (low). Low consistency isn't bad either — it describes a rarer combination that fewer ready-made roles serve, which often points toward hybrid or self-built careers.

What is empirically grounded vs. LBL judgment.

Honesty about provenance is a standing LBL principle. Here is the line between what the research supports and what represents our own design decisions:

• Empirically grounded: the six-type RIASEC taxonomy and its person–environment fit logic (Holland 1959, 1997); the approximate hexagonal/circular ordering of the types across large samples and cultures (Rounds & Tracey 1996; Nauta 2010); the Data–Ideas and Things–People dimensions beneath the hexagon (Prediger 1982); the RIASEC indexing of occupations in the public-domain O*NET system (Rounds et al. 1999); and the congruence–satisfaction link, honestly noted as modest in meta-analysis (Assouline & Meir 1987).
• LBL design judgment: all 36 item wordings; six items per type; the simplified differentiation index and its band cut-points; the adjacency-based consistency readout; the hexagon-order tie-break; and the example-occupation lists. These are reasoned choices, not validated parameters.
• Not yet done: formal reliability per scale and convergent-validity testing against the public-domain O*NET Interest Profiler. Until that is complete, treat your code as a structured reflection tool, not a measurement.

How to read your code.

• The first letter carries the most weight — it names the kind of work you'd least have to talk yourself into. The second and third letters shade it: an AIS and an ASE are both Artistic-led, but one leans toward research-flavored creation and the other toward audience-facing creation.
• Search flexibly. Occupations indexed under any permutation of your three letters are worth a look, as are codes sharing your first two letters.
• Interests are one input. Abilities, values, constraints, and the labor market are the others — which is exactly what our Career Pivot Decision Matrix exists to weigh.

What this assessment doesn't capture.

• It measures interests, not abilities — loving a kind of work is not the same as being (or becoming) good at it, and the two diverge more often than people expect.
• It is not career advice: it says nothing about openings, pay, credentials, or the viability of a move — a compass, not a map.
• Interests consolidate over time and shift most during your twenties; a flat or surprising profile today is information, not a verdict.
• Item examples carry cultural and era assumptions about what work looks like; rate the underlying activity, not the specific image.
• It has not been validated against the established inventories, and the metrics and bands are design choices (see above).

References

How to cite this test.

If you reference the Career Interest Test or the LBL-RIA v1.0 framework in academic work, teaching, or press, cite LifeByLogic as the author. The instrument's 36 items and framework are released under CC BY-NC 4.0 — free to cite, quote, and reuse non-commercially with attribution.