Career Guide

Career Guide helps you find a career you will like.

Career Guide helps you find a career by matching your interests, skills, and knowledge with the interest, skill, and knowledge characteristics of over 1000 different occupations. Start by taking an interests quiz that will classify your interests into distinct categories. Then identify your knowledge, skills, and other qualifications (such as your salary requirements) to see what career options are a best fit for you.

Pick a career target to reveal knowledge and skill gaps between your target and your current job. And see what job opportunities exist for the career you've chosen.

How does this work

The careers and the career characteristics in this app are based on version 16.0 of the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database. The interest quiz is based on questions and interest classifications in the O*NET Interest Profiler. O*NET is developed under the sponsorship of the US Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA) through a grant to the North Carolina Employment Security Commission. This app uses the information publicly provided by these organizations but is not endorsed by them in any way.

Version 16.0 of the O*NET database contains over 1000 occupations and related characteristics. Although this database is quite extensive, there are some minor gaps in characteristics for some of the careers. Where there are gaps, we have taken data from similar careers and averaged their characteristics to fill in the gaps. For each career listed, values for each interest, skill, and knowledge characteristic were taken from the O*NET database and were normalized across the reported values for that characteristic. This normalization resulted in scores ranging from 1 to 100 for each characteristic for each occupation.

To match careers to characteristics, each occupation's characteristic profile is compared to the characteristics specified and the overall % match is calculated. A perfect match would result in an overall score of 100%. Occupations with the highest characteristic match are listed first.

Qualifiers are treated differently. They are criteria that must be met for an occupation to be displayed. So, for example, if salaries "Over $50,000" is selected, no occupations with a salary lower than $50,000 will display.