The Jordan Peterson Career Test Reads Temperament and Stops There

Search for a career test by Jordan Peterson and you will not find one with that name. Peterson never built a test that ends in job suggestions. What he built with his research colleagues is a personality test. He has also spent years telling audiences that personality should shape the work they choose. People join those two ideas and call the result his career test.

What Personality Test Does Jordan Peterson Recommend?

Jordan Peterson recommends Understand Myself, a $9.95 online Big Five personality test he helped develop. It scores you on five traits and ten aspects, as percentiles against other test takers, in 10 to 20 minutes. It describes your temperament but does not suggest any careers.

When Peterson talks about knowing yourself, he points to Understand Myself, the Jordan Peterson personality test sold at understandmyself.com. Its scoring comes from the Big Five Aspects Scale, which Colin DeYoung, Lena Quilty and Peterson published in 2007 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their paper split each of the five big traits into two narrower aspects, giving ten scores in all. The test is the public version of that research.

What Is Understand Myself? About 100 Self-Ratings Scored as Percentiles

The Understand Myself test is a list of statements about you. Reviewers count about 100 of them, and the site says the whole thing takes 10 to 20 minutes. You give every line a score from 1 to 5, depending on how true it feels. At the end you get a written report that places you against other people who took it, trait by trait, as a percentile. Say you land at the 80th percentile for orderliness: you rated yourself as tidier and more organized than about eight in ten people.

The individual report costs $9.95. The couples version, which compares two people, costs $19.90 and comes with a voucher for your partner. Extra vouchers cost $9.95 each, or less in packs of five, ten or twenty. What the report does not contain is any section on careers. It describes your temperament in detail and says nothing about which jobs fit it. This page fills that gap.

Peterson's other career-adjacent tool is the Self Authoring Suite, a set of guided writing exercises at selfauthoring.com. Past Authoring has you write through the key good and bad experiences of your life. Present Authoring works on your faults and your virtues, and Future Authoring has you picture the life you want in three to five years and write a plan to get there. It helps you set career goals, but like Understand Myself it names no jobs.

What Is the Big 5 Personality Test, and Why Is It So Widely Used?

The Big Five sorts personality into five broad traits, known by the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. It grew out of decades of work in which researchers gathered everyday words for describing people and found they fall into five groups. Most modern personality research uses it, as the overview on Wikipedia sets out. Conscientiousness in particular has a long record of predicting how well people do at work.

How Do Big 5 Tests Like Jordan Peterson's Compare to MBTI?

Big 5 tests like Jordan Peterson's give you a score on a scale for each trait. The MBTI gives you a four-letter type out of 16 possible, and a couple of changed answers can flip it. Researchers prefer scales because most people land somewhere in the middle, and a scale shows that. MBTI results are easier to remember and talk about. Neither one names jobs by itself. For a longer side by side, see our Myers-Briggs career test page.

The Jordan Peterson Big Five test works the way most personality questionnaires do. You read a statement such as "I get chores done right away" or "I am quick to understand things." Then you give it a 1 to 5 rating for how true it is of you. Your answers for each trait are added up and compared with a big sample of people who took it before you, which is where the percentile comes from.

The Ten Big Five Aspects the Peterson Test Scores

The Big Five Aspects Scale is what makes Peterson's version different from a basic five-trait test. Each trait gets two halves:

• Openness: intellect (enjoying ideas and hard problems) and openness (art, beauty, imagination).
• Conscientiousness: industriousness (getting work done) and orderliness (keeping things neat and on schedule).
• Extraversion: enthusiasm (warmth, liking company) and assertiveness (taking charge, speaking up).
• Agreeableness: compassion (caring about how others feel) and politeness (respect for rules and authority).
• Neuroticism: volatility (quick to anger or upset) and withdrawal (worry, low mood, pulling back).

The split matters for work. Two people can have the same conscientiousness score while one is hardworking but messy and the other is tidy but slow to start. Those people fit different jobs, and a five-trait test would call them the same.

What Personality Test Do Psychologists and Researchers Use?

In universities, the Big Five is the standard way to study personality. The statements behind the Big Five Aspects Scale were drawn from the International Personality Item Pool, which is a free public collection of test questions that researchers share. That is good news for the science: the items have been checked across many studies. In the 2007 paper that built the scale, DeYoung and his colleagues found each of the ten aspect scores held together well, with reliability scores (alphas) of roughly .7 to .9, where 1.0 would be perfectly consistent. Like every questionnaire of this kind, though, it has one known weak spot.

Why Self-Rating Can Tilt a Jordan Peterson Big Five Test

Each score is your own view of yourself. People tend to describe the self they aim for, a habit psychologists call social desirability bias. Someone who wishes they were organized may rate themselves higher on orderliness than their desk would suggest. Taking the test at home, for yourself, lowers the pressure, but it does not remove it.

Can a Free Big 5 Test Be as Accurate as a Paid One?

Since the research items are free to use, several free tests draw on the same pool. The IPIP-NEO, a 120-item version, is free and widely used. On raw measurement, a well-built free test and Understand Myself are close. What your $9.95 buys is the ten-aspect breakdown and a longer written explanation of what your scores mean in daily life.

Peterson's advice on how to choose the right job comes down to a simple rule in his lectures: find work where your temperament is an advantage rather than something you fight every day. A big five career test gives you the raw material. The table below turns each high or low score into kinds of work that tend to suit it. These are common patterns from career research and Peterson's own talks, not rules, and any single job can be done well by many different personalities.

What Type of Job Is Right for You?

Start with the scores at the ends of your report, the ones below the 30th or above the 70th percentile. Those are the traits most likely to make a job feel easy or hard. Scores near the middle rarely rule anything in or out.

Your score

Work that tends to suit it

Work that tends to grate

High conscientiousness

Project management, accounting, operations, law, nursing

Loose roles with no deadlines or clear finish line

Low conscientiousness

Improvised, fast-moving work: live events, early-stage startups, creative production

Audit, compliance, detail-heavy admin

High openness

Research, design, writing, strategy, starting a business

Repetitive work with fixed rules and little that is new

Low openness

Skilled trades, operations, roles with proven methods

Jobs that change direction every quarter

High extraversion

Sales, management, teaching, recruiting, public relations

Long stretches of solo analysis

Low extraversion

Engineering, data analysis, writing, lab work

Crowded, always-on client roles

High agreeableness

Nursing, counseling, teaching, customer support, HR

Hard negotiation, collections, litigation

Low agreeableness

Negotiation, trial law, investing, turnaround management

Care roles where warmth is the main skill

Low neuroticism

Emergency medicine, trading, air traffic control, crisis roles

Few; calm travels well

High neuroticism

Careful work that rewards spotting risk early: quality control, safety, editing

Constant high-stakes pressure with no recovery time

Source note: the trait-to-work links follow Barrick and Mount's 1991 review of personality and job performance and the work styles lists in O*NET OnLine.

Read Your Big Five Career Test Aspects, Not Only Your Traits

Use the aspect scores to sharpen the table. High industriousness with low orderliness points to roles where output counts and neatness does not, like sales or journalism. High compassion with low politeness suits advocacy work, where you care about people and are happy to push back on the system for them. High intellect with average openness leans toward analysis and engineering more than art.

Extraversion splits the same way. High assertiveness with modest enthusiasm fits people who like to lead a room but do not need company all day, which describes many good managers and trial lawyers. High enthusiasm with low assertiveness suits warm, people-facing roles where you support rather than direct, such as teaching young children or hospitality. And low volatility with high withdrawal is common in steady professionals who stay calm in a crisis and do their worrying afterwards.

A Worked Example: From Three Scores to Three Roles

Take a profile with industriousness at the 85th percentile, orderliness at the 20th, and enthusiasm at the 25th. High industriousness with low orderliness points to roles where output counts and tidiness does not. Low enthusiasm lands on the low extraversion row of the table: analysis, writing, engineering, and work done mostly alone. Put together, a fair shortlist is:

• Data or investigative journalist: judged on stories filed, with long solo research stretches.
• Software developer on a small team: judged on what ships, with little client contact.
• Market research analyst: deep solo work where the finished report matters more than a neat process.

The same profile would find audit work, office administration or a recruiting desk a daily fight.

Jordan Peterson on How to Choose the Right Job, in Writing

Most of what Peterson has said about careers lives in long videos. Pulled together, his advice runs roughly like this:

• Know your temperament first. Take a Big Five test and believe the results, even the parts you do not like.
• Look at the demands of the job, not only the title. Ask what the work asks of you hour by hour, and whether your traits help or fight it.
• Match complexity to ability. In complex jobs, raw intelligence does most of the predicting, so be honest about how quickly you learn hard material.
• Watch agreeableness at pay time. He often points out that very agreeable people tend to ask for less and bargain less hard, so they may need to push more than feels natural.
• Give openness somewhere to go. Creative, curious people who land in routine work tend to feel stuck, so they need a job, or a life outside it, with room for new ideas.

It is sensible advice. Notice, though, that only the first step is something his test helps with.

Personality Fit Counts Most in Simpler, Repetitive Jobs

Peterson is clear in his talks that personality is not the whole story. He says general intelligence is the best single predictor of how people perform in complex jobs, which matches Schmidt and Hunter's 1998 review of 85 years of hiring research, where general mental ability was the strongest single predictor. After it, conscientiousness is the strongest personality trait, especially in management and administration, the main finding of Barrick and Mount's 1991 review of 117 studies. Openness, he says, tends to mark entrepreneurs and creative people. So yes, matching your job to your personality matters, and on his account it matters more the simpler and more repetitive the job is.

Does Your Job Need to Match Your Personality?

It helps, and you can test the fit of your current job. Write down the three tasks that take up most of your hours, then hold them up against your top and bottom scores. A low extraversion accountant who spends half the week on client calls has a mismatch you can name. A high openness analyst who has run the same report for four years has another. Then look up a few alternative roles on O*NET OnLine, the free US occupation database, and read the "work activities" lists with your scores beside you. If you want more on turning a result into a decision, our guide on choosing a career step by step picks up from here.

Understand Myself is at its best when you mainly want to know "what am I like?" rather than "what should I do next?" Here is how that plays out for the people who most often search for it.

Readers Who Want to Know Themselves Better

If you have read Peterson's books and want an accurate picture of your temperament, this is a good $9.95. The aspect scores are more detailed than most free tests, and the written report is easy to follow. Many people use it to understand why they clash with a partner or a manager, and the couples version is built for that.

Students Choosing a Major

Your Big Five scores can rule a few fields in or out, but at 18 you have little evidence about your abilities, and the test adds none. Pair it with your grades in the subjects you are considering. Add an interest inventory, for example the Holland Code career test, which asks which activities appeal to you.

A Big Five Test for Career Change

If you are ten or more years into work and thinking about a switch, a big five test for career change can confirm what you already suspect about yourself. It rarely tells you something new about where to go. By now you have a track record. The open question is less about temperament and more about your working habits and the setting that suits them. A test that asks about work directly will help more.

Managers Looking at a Team

Understand Myself is designed for individuals and couples, not for hiring or for sorting a team. If you want to use personality at work, use it for conversations about how people like to work, never to decide who gets a job. Shared openly, scores can help a team split work sensibly, for example handing the final checks on a project to its most orderly member.

Keep what Understand Myself gives you. Your temperament scores are real information, and Peterson's point that work should suit your nature is sound advice. Then add the two things the test leaves open: your abilities, and how you handle the job itself.

Pick the Next Test by the Question You Still Have

Test

Price

What it tells you

Names careers?

Understand Myself

$9.95

Your five traits and ten aspects

No

IPIP-NEO 120 and other free Big Five tests

Free

Your five traits, with less written detail

No

Holland Code (RIASEC) interest tests

Free to about $25

Which kinds of activity appeal to you

Yes, by interest area

MBTI and 16 type tests

Free to about $50

One of 16 personality types

Loosely

Pigment

$79.99

How you decide, learn and pace your work, and which roles fit

Yes

If you only want to compare Big Five options, our Big 5 personality assessment page looks at the main ones side by side, and our piece on the big 5 career test covers how to read your percentiles.

Does the Jordan Peterson Career Test Measure Ability?

No. There are no puzzles, no timed questions and no right answers, so nothing in it checks reasoning or skill. On Peterson's own account that is the biggest factor in complex work. Your best evidence for ability is what you have already done: grades, work results, and what colleagues say about you when things get hard. A timed reasoning test adds a number if you want one.

Why Forced-Choice Career Tests Resist Self-Flattery

Rating statements one at a time makes it easy to agree with every good quality. A forced-choice format sets options against each other, so saying yes to one means saying no to another. Cao and Drasgow gathered the studies on this for the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2019. When people had something to gain by looking good, scores on forced-choice scales rose far less than scores on single-statement scales. The format does not remove the problem, but it shrinks it.

Where Pigment Fits After Understand Myself

Pigment's career test is forced-choice and takes under 20 minutes. Its questions are about work: the way you decide, pick up new skills, talk with people, and the working pace that suits you over the long run. The report is 36 pages and includes a Career Alignment section that proposes roles to explore. It is taken mostly by people in mid-career, and it is grounded in published studies of workplace fit; formal academic testing of Pigment itself is ongoing. It is built for your own career decisions, not for screening job candidates, and it does not measure intelligence.

You Know Your Temperament. Now Match It to Work

Peterson's test describes your temperament. Pigment asks how you work, then ends its 36-page report on roles that fit your decisions, your pace and how much time you like to spend with people. $79.99, read the same day.

Match your temperament to real roles