How the six dimensions are scored
Every item maps onto one of the six dimensions. Your six scores are relative shares of one total, then ranked, with your strongest interest scaled to 100; your top three letters form your Holland Code (e.g. SAE, RIC). The ranking — not just the dominant letter — matters, because real careers blend two or three dimensions, not just one. Beside each bar, a percentile compares your raw answers for that interest with the people in our norm table.
Reference: Holland, J. L. (1997). Making Vocational Choices, 3rd ed. PAR.
Why we use four input modalities, not just one
The 69 items are split across activities you'd enjoy, occupations you're drawn to, work-environment scenarios, and self-rated competencies. Pure interest-only inventories miss skill realism (people answer aspirationally); pure skill-only inventories miss motivation. Combining the four is meant to balance aspiration against self-assessed skill; we have not measured how much it does.
Reference: Armstrong, P. I., Allison, W., & Rounds, J. (2008). Development and initial validation of brief public domain RIASEC marker scales. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 73(2), 287–299.
From interests to careers
On My Path your result describes each of your top types — what it means, the work environments it tends to fit, and its typical traits — rather than printing a job list. The career-by-career list runs on our sister site my-career-path.com, where the same test is available without sign-up: your top letters pick 22 careers from a 500+ career library, weighted by how strongly each letter scored, each with a salary range, education path and growth outlook. Each career there is filed under a single Holland letter; there is no O*NET coding or similarity score behind the list.
What the score does NOT predict
RIASEC predicts interest fit, not skill ceiling and not job-market viability. A high Investigative + Realistic score doesn't tell you whether you should be a structural engineer or a data scientist — both fit. It also says nothing about which of those jobs are hiring where you live.
Reference: Nye, C. D., Su, R., Rounds, J., & Drasgow, F. (2012). Vocational interests and performance: A quantitative summary of over 60 years of research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 384–403.
How reliable is this test, and what we can honestly claim
The norm table behind your percentiles holds 11,697 completed sittings of the full form (generated September 2026). The bars you see are shares of one total — they rank your interests against each other — so internal consistency is measured on the raw answers for each interest instead: Cronbach's α ranges from 0.62 to 0.75 across the six interests, and three of them (Realistic, Enterprising, Conventional) fall below the 0.70 usually asked of a reported scale, so read those as indicative. Your scores are compared against a norm table built from completions on this platform, which means a percentile tells you where you sit relative to other people who chose to take this test here, not relative to the general population. No across-sitting test-retest study has ever been run on this platform for any test, so we cannot tell you how much your profile would move if you came back in six months, and we have not compared this instrument against an external published interest inventory.
Reference: Full figures, and every analysis we have not run, on our methodology page: /about/methodology/