Research and methodology

What does the assessment measure?

The assessment builds a profile of you across five dimensions, and each one answers a different question about the shape of work that would suit you.

• Interests (six areas: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, conventional). What pulls your attention toward some kinds of work and away from others.
• Strengths and skills (seven areas: analytical, creative, leadership, technical, communication, social, organisation). What you are good at and, more importantly, what you are good at and still enjoy using.
• Motivations and values (eight career anchors: security and stability, autonomy and independence, technical mastery, leadership, building things, service to others, challenge and achievement, lifestyle balance). What decides whether work feels worth doing.
• Neuro-aware environment fit (four areas: stimulation and variety, structure and process, sensory and social load, interest-driven focus). Whether the daily conditions of a job match the conditions under which you function at your best.
• Personality and thinking style (four paired preferences: sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling, extraversion and introversion, judging and perceiving). How you take in information, how you reach a decision, and how you recover your attention.

Every career in the library carries its own researched profile across those same five dimensions, which makes the match a comparison of two profiles and not a judgement dressed up as one.

Which research traditions does each dimension come from?

Each dimension builds on a published framework from vocational or organisational psychology, and we name them here so that you can read the primary sources and form your own view of the foundations.

• Interests use the RIASEC model developed by John Holland, which has been the dominant structure in vocational interest research since the 1950s and underlies the interest inventories published by government labour departments in several countries.
• Motivations and values use the career anchors framework developed by Edgar Schein at MIT, which describes the underlying preference a person will not trade away when forced to choose between competing offers.
• Personality and thinking style use the four paired preferences that descend from Carl Jung's work on psychological types and were later developed into type-based instruments. We describe the lineage, and we make no claim to be a licensed version of any commercial instrument. This dimension carries the smallest share of the result, for reasons set out below.
• Strengths and skills use a seven-area framework built for this product and mapped onto the occupational skill descriptors published in public labour-market datasets, so that a strength you claim and a strength a career demands resolve to the same thing.
• Neuro-aware environment fit has the least prior art of the five. We built it because working conditions decide whether somebody stays in a job long after interest and skill have said they should.

We build on these frameworks and we have not replicated the validation work behind them, and the section on what we do not claim sets out that boundary.

What is neuro-aware environment fit?

Neuro-aware environment fit departs furthest from a conventional career test, because a person can match a career on interest, skill and values and still leave it inside a year when the room is wrong.

The four areas describe how much change and novelty the work involves, how much clear and predictable process it provides, how heavy the noise and activity and interpersonal demand run through a normal day, and how far the work rewards sustained focus on something that interests you over routine execution of something that does not. Each area is described the same way for the person and for the career, which lets a mismatch on structure or sensory load pull a match down even when the interest alignment is strong.

The dimension applies to everybody who completes the assessment, whether or not they identify as neurodivergent, and no question anywhere in the assessment asks for or assumes a diagnosis. It asks about working conditions directly, because working conditions decide whether a Tuesday goes well.

How is a career matched to you?

Each of the five dimensions is compared separately, your profile against the career's profile, and the five comparisons are then combined into a single match score.

Dimensions do not contribute equally. Interests contribute the most, because interest has the longest research record of the five for predicting sustained engagement with a field. Strengths come next, then motivations and values, then neuro-aware environment fit. Personality and thinking style contributes the least, because personality typing carries the weakest evidence base of the five for predicting what work a person stays in, and its popularity is no reason to weight it higher.

A dimension contributes only when both you and the career have been measured on it. Where one side is missing, that dimension leaves the comparison and the remaining dimensions carry more of the result, so that a gap hands influence to the dimensions we did measure, and no gap is filled with a value nobody supplied.

What happens when your answers are flat?

Somebody who answers every question near the middle produces a profile with little variation, and treating that profile with the same confidence as a distinctive one would produce matches that look precise and are not.

Where your answers on a dimension show little variation, that dimension carries less of the result, and it never disappears entirely. The practical effect is that a person with a clear, differentiated profile on three dimensions and a flat fourth receives a result driven by the three that said something, which is a fair reading of what they told us.

Are there adjustments beyond the five dimensions?

Two, and each corrects a specific way the comparison would otherwise mislead.

• A values mismatch is treated as serious. Where you hold one sharply defined motivation above the others and a career runs directly against it, the match is pulled down, and strong interest and skill alignment will not carry it. Somebody whose defining requirement is autonomy should not be handed a role built entirely on hierarchy because the other numbers looked good.
• Education distance is weighed, never used as a filter. Every career carries the education level that gets people hired, and the match accounts for the distance between that level and your own. Careers far below your level are damped, because a match that ignores what you have already invested wastes your time. Careers above your level are treated generously for students, so that a seventeen year old with a strong underlying match to a role requiring a further degree is shown that direction and left to decide for themselves whether the years are worth spending.

Careers that finish level are separated consistently, so retaking the assessment with the same answers returns the same order.

What is deliberately kept out of the match?

Matching reflects identity, not circumstance, and several things people expect to find inside the score are measured, shown to you, and kept outside it by design.

Projected employment growth is one. Every career carries a growth figure, that figure sits beside the result where you can see it, and it never moves the match, because a career that fits you should not rank lower this year because a forecast moved. Geography, current labour market conditions and personal circumstance are handled the same way, appearing as context around the result, never as a filter applied before you ever see it.

The principle underneath is that a matching engine should tell you what fits the person you are, and the decision about whether a fitting direction is practical belongs to you, your family and the adviser sitting with you, all of whom know things about your situation that no assessment can see.

Why measure five dimensions instead of one personality type?

A single personality test collapses a person to one lens, describing how you are wired without asking what draws you, what you are good at, what you want work to give back, or which daily conditions let you do your best work.

Two people who produce the same four-letter type can want entirely different things from a career and can thrive in entirely different rooms, and a method that cannot tell them apart will hand them the same list. Measuring five dimensions and weighting interest above personality separates those two people, and it also means that no single dimension can carry a match on its own.

Where does the career data come from?

The library holds more than four thousand individually researched career records across eighteen industries, and each record carries entry, median and senior salary figures, the education level that gets people hired, projected growth to 2033, a written account of what the work involves on an ordinary day, and its profile across the five dimensions.

Records are compiled from public labour-market datasets, occupational classifications, industry sources and published salary research, then reviewed and normalised so that every career carries the same fields described the same way. A career's profile is built at the moment its record is written, so a career cannot enter the library carrying a profile that disagrees with its own data.

What do we not claim?

This is the part of the page that matters most, and we would rather write it ourselves than have somebody else write it for us.

• We have not published peer-reviewed validation studies. We build on frameworks that others have validated, and that is a different thing from validating this assessment. We do not report reliability or predictive validity figures, because we do not have them yet.
• We have not established norm samples. Your profile is compared against career profiles, not against a normed population, so the result tells you how closely you resemble a career and not where you sit relative to other people.
• The assessment is not a clinical instrument. It diagnoses nothing, it never asks about diagnosis, and it should not be used for hiring, selection, or any decision made about a person by somebody else.
• A match is not a prediction of success. It is a measure of resemblance between two profiles, and resemblance is where a search begins.
• Neuro-aware environment fit is the newest and least externally grounded of the five dimensions. We think it is the most useful addition we have made and we are also the people most likely to be wrong about that.

We are working toward published validation, and this page will carry it when we have it. Until then the method is documented and reproducible, and documentation is not proof.

How should you use your matches?

A ranked list is a shortlist, not a verdict, and the way to close the distance between a match and a life is to test the top of the list in the real world at small scale.

Pick one role from your matches and find the smallest accessible version of its core work, whether that is a short freelance project, a volunteer position, a course with practical work attached, or an hour with somebody already doing the job. What you learn in that hour will tell you more than any assessment can, and the assessment has done its job if it told you which hour was worth spending.

Frequently asked questions