The Career Assessment PDF Worth Keeping Explains Your Job Matches

Run that search and you get three different things mixed together. The first is a blank form: a list of activities you tick, add up, and turn into a short code. The second is a results report, the document an online test gives you at the end. The third is a guide written for counselors, which explains assessments but has no blanks to complete. If your goal is working out which careers fit you, the first two are the ones to use, and they do different jobs.

Looking for the guide? Counselors who want the method rather than a form should start with the NCDA and AACE career counselor assessment competencies (PDF) and O*NET's technical Short Form psychometric summary (PDF).

A career assessment asks about you and answers with kinds of work

A career assessment is a scored questionnaire, built so your answers line up with groups of jobs. It can cover your likes, your skills, or your working habits. Most free ones cover likes only. They ask if you would enjoy an activity, and they skip your skill at it and whether you could handle its pace, hours, and people five days a week.

Career exploration is the legwork that comes after the score

Career exploration is everything you do with a result: reading about a job, asking someone who does it, trying a piece of the work. An assessment starts it. It never replaces it, and the best printable forms say so on the last page by handing you a worksheet of jobs to look up.

Which career tests you can print and score by hand

Plenty of online career tests let you print the questions, but only a few were built to be scored on paper. Those few come with a tally box for each area, so a pen and ten minutes of adding is all you need. If a test can only be scored by its website, printing it gets you a questionnaire with no answer key.

Free Career Assessment PDFs You Can Print Today

These are the printable career assessment forms worth your paper. All are free, all come from public or nonprofit bodies, and all measure interests, not skills.

Form

Maker

Items

Minutes

Ages

Framework

What you get

Link

O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form

National Center for O*NET Development, for the U.S. Department of Labor

60 activities on one page

10 to 20

Teens and adults

Holland's six interest areas (RIASEC)

A three-letter code, plus a score report in two versions: standard, and Career Starter for people with no work history yet

O*NET downloads

O*NET Mini-IP

National Center for O*NET Development

30 activities

10 to 20

Teens and adults

Holland's six interest areas (RIASEC)

Scores on screen and a job list, in English or Spanish. Online only, no PDF

Take it online

Career Interest Survey, Cluster-by-Cluster Edition

Advance CTE with Indigo Education

Three columns of statements for each of 14 clusters

Not stated

Grades 4 to 8 with a teacher, high school and up alone

National Career Clusters Framework

Your top three clusters, ready to match to school programs. Print, fillable or online

Advance CTE page

Career Interest Survey, Motivators Edition

Advance CTE with Indigo Education

30 statements, each rated 0 to 2

Not stated

Students, after the cluster survey

Six motivators linked to Career Clusters

A score out of 10 for each motivator, such as Theoretical or Social

Advance CTE page

Career Interest Inventory, Pictorial Version

Shasta Twenty-first Century Career Connections

36 pictures, six per area, over two pages

Not stated

Middle school and weaker readers

Holland's six interest areas (RIASEC)

A total per area and the picture set you enjoy most, linked to high school courses

Get the PDF

Career Cluster Interest Survey (Kentucky)

Kentucky Department of Education

16 boxes of activities, qualities and school subjects, over seven pages

Not stated

Middle and high school

The older 16-cluster framework

Your top three clusters, with a page on each cluster after the survey

Get the PDF

O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form PDF

This is the one to start with if you are an adult. It is a free paper-and-pencil version of the O*NET Interest Profiler. O*NET's developers made it with U.S. Department of Labor sponsorship. It works as a holland code career test PDF. The six areas are Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional, and each goes by its first letter. Your top three become your code. The form tells you not to think about pay or training while you tick, which keeps the answers about what you would enjoy.

Career Cluster Interest Survey PDF

The Cluster-by-Cluster Edition from Advance CTE comes as a print PDF, a fillable PDF, and an online version. Each cluster has three columns of statements: things you like to do, things that describe you, and problems you want to solve. It maps to school programs, so a counselor can turn your top clusters straight into classes.

Printable Career Interest Inventory for Students

For a class, the Career Clusters survey is the easier career interest inventory PDF to run, because its statements are short and plain and the clusters match what schools offer. For students who read little, the pictorial inventory swaps words for pictures. For older students who can handle job titles, pair the O*NET form with its Career Starter score report.

Scoring a paper career assessment worksheet is simple arithmetic. Reading it well takes more care. On the O*NET Short Form, each interest area is one shaded block of ten activities, with a Total box to its right.

1. Count your ticks in each shaded block. Each block holds ten activities, so each area scores from 0 to 10.
2. Write down the three highest areas. The first is your primary interest. Together the three letters make your code. ISA stands for Investigative, Social, Artistic, in that order.
3. Settle any tie. The form says to put first the tied area whose activities fit you best. Its score report then has you read the jobs under your second and third interests as well, so read the job lists under both orders of the tied letters. If your top scores sit under 3 points apart, a flat top, treat the result as two or three codes rather than one.
4. Pick your Job Zone. The score report sorts jobs into five zones, from almost no training needed up to graduate school. Choose the zone you are in now and a zone you would work toward.

Ten to twenty minutes for the form, longer for the job list

O*NET puts the Short Form at 10 to 20 minutes. The Career Clusters survey runs longer because it has more statements. The tally takes five minutes. The part that takes real time is the job list, and it deserves an evening, not a lunch break.

Turning Your Career Assessment Score Into a Job Shortlist

Take your primary interest and your current Job Zone, and read the jobs listed where the two meet. Then use My Next Move, searched by interest area, to see each job's tasks, its pay, and the training it asks for. Cross out any job whose ordinary tasks you would dread. Keep five.

Next, check how close your top scores sit. A 9, 8, 8 top three is a flat top with three strong interests, so it is really three codes. A 5, 5, 4 means nothing on the sheet grabbed you, and the code is thin. Either way, read your second and third areas as seriously as your first before you trust the shortlist.

A paper form ends when you write down three letters. An online test ends with a career test results PDF, and those vary a lot. Some are two pages and a type label. Some run past thirty pages. Before you pay for one, or trust a free one, check it for five things.

• Your scores in order, with the numbers shown. You should see how far apart your top areas are, not only which came first.
• A plain explanation of each result. What the area means at work, in sentences, not a one-word label.
• Named jobs, each with a stated reason. A list of job titles with no link to your answers is guesswork.
• What the test did not measure. A good report says whether it looked at interests, skills, or both.
• A next step you can do. A person to ask, a job to read about, a task to try.

Career test results come back as scores, a code, and a job list

On an interest test, expect a bar or number for each area, a code of two or three letters, and jobs grouped under that code. Richer reports add a page per result and advice on using it. The thin ones repeat generic job lists that anyone with the same code would get, and the red flag is a report that could belong to a stranger.

Saving online career test results to your own files

With the paper O*NET form, your results are the sheet you filled in, so keep it. With an online test, look for a download or email link on the final screen before you close the tab, because many sites only show results once or put the career assessment report download behind a login. If there is no download, print the page to PDF from your browser. Before you type answers into any site, check its privacy page for where your results are stored, for how long, and whether you can delete them.

For contrast, Pigment's own report runs to 36 pages. Its eight sections open on your strengths, move through how you think, the work you are drawn to, and your working style, and close on your rarest traits. One section, career alignment, recommends roles and shows how your results lead to them.

Reviewed by the Pigment editorial team and checked against the O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form, its score reports, O*NET's 2010 psychometric summary, and the Advance CTE survey PDFs.

The right form depends on who is holding the pen and what they need to decide.

Teachers and counselors running a class

Use the free forms. The Career Clusters survey fits a single lesson, needs no logins, and lines up with the programs your school runs. The O*NET Short Form works for older groups, and its score report walks students through Job Zones without you having to teach them first.

Career Assessment PDF for High School Students

At this age a form should be free, short, and about interests, because at 15 there is not much work history to draw on. Start with the Career Starter version of the O*NET report and use the code to pick a few fields to try this year. Our free career test for students PDF page covers scoring for this age in more depth, and the career exploration worksheet turns a code into research.

Career Assessment PDF for Adults Changing Careers

If you have a decade of work behind you, a printable form will still name your interests, and it is worth ten minutes. It will not tell you why your last job wore you out when you liked the field. The answer usually lies in how you like to work and what a normal week asks of you, which is why adults changing careers tend to need a full report on top of a code. The self-assessment for a career change page lists the questions to ask yourself first, and the career interest assessment page explains what interest scores can and cannot settle.

• Running a class for grades 4 to 8? Use the Career Clusters survey with a teacher leading.
• A high school or college student? Use the O*NET Short Form with the Career Starter report.
• An adult who wants a free first look? Use the O*NET Short Form with the standard report.
• An adult about to make a move? Use a report that explains your results and the jobs it suggests.

Printed career aptitude tests mostly measure interest

Many forms sold as a career aptitude test PDF are interest inventories. They are fair at what they measure. O*NET's 2010 summary of the Short Form research, by James Rounds and colleagues, scored consistency on a 0 to 1 scale, where 1 is perfect. The ten items in each area agreed with each other at .78 to .87 in a sample of 1,061 people. When 132 people took the form twice, their scores matched at .78 to .86. A tick next to Repair household appliances records that you would like the work. Skill and staying power sit outside what the form asks. Use the code to decide where to look first.

After the Printout: Ask Someone, Then Try the Work

Take the top two jobs from your shortlist and find one person doing each. Ask what a typical week involves and what surprised them in their first year. Then find a small way to try part of the work, such as a volunteer shift, a short course, or a side project, before you commit to training for it. For a wider view of tools past the printable ones, see the career test guide.

Keep a Career Report That Explains Your Results

A printed form gives you a code and a job list to decode yourself. The Pigment report starts with your strengths, adds how you prefer to work and the pace and people you would stick with, and ends by recommending roles with each match explained. The price is $79.99.

Look inside the Pigment report