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Career Interests

What kinds of activities and work environments attract me?

Thirty everyday work activities from the O*NET Mini Interest Profiler. Say how much you’d like doing each, and see which of six kinds of work draw you most.

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30 work activities · About 4 minutesOur estimate

Validated Instrument

What it looks at

How much you’d like six broad kinds of work activity — Holland’s RIASEC interest areas, as O*NET describes them:

  • RealisticWork involves building, repairing, maintaining, installing, driving, or working with hands. People with Realistic interests often like work that includes plants, animals, electronics, real-world materials like wood, the outdoors, machines, equipment, or tools.
  • InvestigativeWork involves studying, researching, testing, analyzing, diagnosing, discovering, thinking, or problem solving. People with Investigative interests often like work that includes science, knowledge, laboratory settings, ideas, or facts.
  • ArtisticWork involves creating, performing, writing, designing, dancing, composing, or self-expression. People with Artistic interests often like work that includes art, media, music, theatre, or graphics.
  • SocialWork involves helping, teaching, educating, guiding, advising, or nurturing. People with Social interests often like work that includes people, service, social activities, health, or communication.
  • EnterprisingWork involves managing, supervising, negotiating, marketing, selling, leading, or directing. People with Enterprising interests often like work that includes employees, customers, products, business, law, or politics.
  • ConventionalWork involves organizing, recording, filing, sorting, inspecting, or attention to detail. People with Conventional interests often like work that includes information, data, regulations, office environments, procedures, files, or rules.

What it does not measure

  • It doesn’t measure ability, talent or intelligence. Liking an activity and being good at it are different things.
  • It doesn’t tell you what career you should choose, or predict whether you’d succeed or be happy in a job.
  • It doesn’t compare you with other people: there are no percentiles, and the middle of a line is not “average”.
  • It isn’t a personality type. Six separate interest areas are shown, and the strongest ones can change over time.

What you’ll see

You’ll see all six interest areas on their own lines, which ones are strongest for you — grouped when they’re too close to separate — and what each area tends to involve. There are no job matches, percentiles or types.

Evidence and research basis

Validated Instrument

A published questionnaire whose reliability and validity have been studied by researchers, used here with its items, response format and scoring unchanged. Infeee did not create or validate it.

How Infeee labels evidence

Validated instrument: the O*NET Mini Interest Profiler, used unchanged.

The 30 activities, the five answers and the scoring are the O*NET Mini Interest Profiler, developed for the U.S. Department of Labor. Infeee did not create or validate it, and O*NET has not endorsed Infeee. The descriptions of each area are O*NET’s; the rest of the explanation is Infeee’s.

Each area rests on five example activities. If those particular examples don’t appeal for other reasons — the setting, the pay, a bad experience — your score may understate an interest.

With five activities per area, scores carry measurement error of about two points either way. Close scores aren’t meaningfully different.

Interests are one part of a work decision. Values, circumstances, skills and the people you’d work with matter too.

Sources (4)
  1. National Center for O*NET Development. Development of an O*NET® Mini Interest Profiler (Mini-IP) for Mobile Devices: Psychometric Characteristics.The 30 activities, their order, the five-point answers, the scoring, and the reliability and validity evidence used here.
  2. O*NET Resource Center. O*NET Interest Profiler.The Interest Profiler family (Mini-IP and Short Form) and its licensing.
  3. National Center for O*NET Development. O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form Score Report (v1.1).O*NET’s own descriptions of the six interest areas, quoted on this page.
  4. O*NET Resource Center. O*NET Tools Developer License.The licence under which Infeee presents the Mini-IP in its own interface.

About this topic

The Mini-IP keeps five activities from each of the six areas of the 60-item O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, chosen for measurement quality, coverage and gender balance, and was checked in two samples (1,061 and 575 people).

With the five-point answers, internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) was .74 to .81 across the six areas, and each area correlated .95 or .96 with the same area on the 60-item form (its activities are part of that longer form, which raises this figure).

The six areas reproduced the circular arrangement of Holland’s interest model, in which neighbouring areas are more closely related than opposite ones.

Sources (1)
  1. National Center for O*NET Development. Development of an O*NET® Mini Interest Profiler (Mini-IP) for Mobile Devices: Psychometric Characteristics.

Your privacy

Your answers are processed in your browser and aren’t saved — not on this device and not on our servers.

When you finish, you can choose to add the result to your Pattern Map. It’s saved only in this browser on this device, and you can remove it at any time.

Before you start

30 work activities · about 4 minutes. This is a self-reflection tool, not career advice. Your answers stay on this device.

Instructions

Read each work activity and choose how you would feel about doing it. Don’t think about how much education or training it needs, or how much money you would make — only whether you would like doing the work.

Every activity needs an answer before your profile can be calculated. You can go back to change an answer, or stop at any time — nothing is saved along the way.

O*NET notice

This page includes information from the O*NET Career Exploration Tools by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the O*NET Tools Developer License. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. Infeee has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. What Infeee changed: the 30 activities, the five answers and the scoring are unchanged. Infeee shows one activity at a time in its own design, uses sentence case for the answers, words the instructions in its own voice, and adds its own explanations of the result. Infeee does not show O*NET career matches.

This is a reflection tool, not a diagnosis. If you feel unsafe or need urgent help, contact your local emergency or crisis support service.

Ready when you are.

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