What Career Suits You?

The quiz uses Holland's RIASEC model, developed by John Holland in the 1950s and still the backbone of most professional career-counselling tools (including the US O*NET interest profiler and many UK careers services). RIASEC sorts work interests into six clusters: Realistic (hands-on, practical, mechanical), Investigative (analytical, scientific, research), Artistic (creative, expressive, unstructured), Social (helping, teaching, supporting), Enterprising (leading, persuading, business), and Conventional (organising, detail-orientated, structured).

The 15 questions present scenarios across these six clusters and score you on each. Your result shows your top three (the 'three-letter code', e.g. RIA or SEC) which is how Holland's model is normally read. Three letters because most people have a primary, secondary, and tertiary interest cluster rather than a single overwhelming one, and the combinations are more useful for career suggestions than the single top score.

Realistic jobs include mechanic, electrician, surgeon, farmer, paramedic. Investigative includes researcher, doctor, data analyst, engineer, scientist. Artistic includes designer, writer, musician, architect, photographer. Social includes teacher, nurse, social worker, therapist, HR. Enterprising includes manager, salesperson, lawyer, entrepreneur, politician. Conventional includes accountant, paralegal, librarian, project administrator, financial analyst.

Plenty of jobs combine clusters. Architecture is RIA (Realistic-Investigative-Artistic). Nursing is SI or SR. Project management is ECS or EC. Doctoring is IRS. Use the three-letter code to look at job families rather than single jobs; sites like the National Careers Service and Prospects.ac.uk let you filter careers by RIASEC code.

The point isn't to find the one perfect job; it's to filter. Around 70 to 80% of UK working-age adults are in jobs that match their top two letters within reason; the unhappiest are usually those whose job sits in their bottom two. If you score high on Artistic and you're working in a Conventional role, the friction will show up as the work feeling drudge-like even when you're competent at it.

If you're early career or considering a switch, look at jobs in your three-letter code that you'd never previously thought about. Most people only know about 20 careers by name and there are hundreds in any cluster. Pair this with the [What Type of Friend Are You](/what-type-of-friend-are-you) quiz for a complementary read on team-role preferences, and the [Stress Level Assessment](/stress-level-assessment) if you suspect your current role is the source of burnout rather than just a poor interest fit.

RIASEC is one of the best-validated career interest frameworks, but it measures interests rather than aptitude or values. You can be deeply interested in something and not have the temperament for the day-to-day work; you can have the aptitude for something that bores you. A real career conversation involves interests, skills, values (autonomy, money, security, impact), and lifestyle constraints. Treat the result as one input among several, not a verdict.