Career Test: Find Your Holland Code (RIASEC)

The six RIASEC types

John L. Holland published his theory of vocational choice in 1959 and refined it over four decades, most fully in Making Vocational Choices (3rd edition, 1997). His claim was simple: people and work environments can both be described with the same six types, and people are more satisfied and stay longer when the two match.

Dale Prediger showed in 1982 that two dimensions sit underneath the six types: working with people versus things, and working with data versus ideas. Social sits at the people end and Realistic at the things end; Conventional and Enterprising lean toward data, and Investigative and Artistic toward ideas.

How to read a three-letter Holland code

Holland arranged the types around a hexagon in the order R, I, A, S, E, C. Neighbors on the hexagon have the most in common (Investigative and Artistic both like ideas). Opposites have the least: Realistic and Social, Investigative and Enterprising, Artistic and Conventional.

1. Start with the first letter

Your first letter is the kind of work most likely to hold your interest over years. If it is clearly ahead of the others, weight it heavily.

2. Check how far apart your scores are

Holland called this differentiation. A profile with Investigative at 85 and everything else under 50 is sharply defined. A profile where all six sit between 45 and 60 is flat, and the order of your letters means little. Flat profiles are common in people who have not had much work experience yet.

3. Look at whether your top letters are neighbors

Holland called this consistency. Codes whose first two letters sit next to each other on the hexagon (RI, IA, SE, EC) are easy to satisfy in one job. Codes whose first two letters are opposite (RS, IE, AC) are less common and usually need a role that combines two worlds, such as a physical therapist (Social work with a Realistic, hands-on side) or a scientist who founds a company.

4. Compare the code to a specific job

Holland called the fit between a person and a job congruence. A data scientist role is usually coded around Investigative and Conventional. If your code is AES, that role may pay well and still leave you bored by month six.

Careers by Holland code

Your Depth Profile results list starter roles for your top two letters. These are some of the pairings the results use:

These are starting points. For the complete picture, O*NET OnLine assigns interest codes to nearly every occupation it covers and lets you filter by code, with pay, outlook and training for each.

What the research says about interests

Interests predict more than satisfaction. Christopher Nye, Rong Su, James Rounds and Fritz Drasgow (2012) pooled over 60 years of studies and found that vocational interests predicted job performance and persistence, and that the fit between a person’s interests and their job predicted better than interests alone.

The link between fit and satisfaction is real but small. Meta-analyses going back to Moshe Assouline and Elchanan Meir (1987) have put the correlation between person-job interest fit and job satisfaction at around 0.2 or lower. Pay, your manager, and the people you work with also matter, so a good code match will not rescue a bad job.

Interests versus personality

Interests and personality overlap less than people expect. Murray Barrick, Michael Mount and Rashmi Gupta (2003) found the strongest links were Extraversion with Enterprising interests and Openness with Artistic interests; most other pairings were small. That leaves plenty of room for, say, an Enterprising person with low Extraversion who would rather build a business than run sales calls.

A practical way to split the work: use your Holland code to choose which field, and your Big Five scores to choose which role inside it. Two Investigative people can both love software. The one high in Extraversion may prefer solutions engineering; the one low in Extraversion and high in Conscientiousness may prefer infrastructure work.

How this test scores you

The RIASEC items are part of Depth Profile’s Career & Leadership assessment, which also measures seven of Edgar Schein’s career anchors (technical expertise, general management, entrepreneurship, security, service, autonomy and challenge) and your leadership style. Career anchors capture what you will not give up in a job, which interests do not.

• You rate how much you would enjoy specific activities, from building or fixing things to persuading a room, on a 1 to 5 scale.
• Each type’s answers are averaged and rescaled to 0 to 100.
• Your three highest types, in order, form your code, and your top two letters select your starter roles.

What to do with your code

1. Shortlist five occupations that match your first two letters in either order.
2. Cut any that clash with your career anchors. If security is your top anchor, early-stage startup roles will grate whatever your code says.
3. Find two people doing each remaining job and ask what a normal Tuesday looks like.
4. Run a small test before a big move: a weekend project, a short course, or a few hours of freelance work in the field.

If the problem is less “which career” and more “I know what I want and keep not doing it,” try the free Why You’re Stuck exercise. Coaches using career results with clients can find a session plan in the guide for coaches, and the Big Five vs MBTI guide explains why trait scores beat four-letter types for career decisions.