Strong Campbell Interest Inventory: New Name, Cost and How to Take It

This is a career interest test. It asks how you feel about hundreds of occupations, school subjects, and daily activities, then lines up your answers against people who work in those jobs and like them. If your likes look like the likes of happy accountants, you score high for accounting. Psychologists call this kind of test an interest inventory. Skill is not on it, and neither is personality.

Why the test is called two different names

The test started in 1927 as the Strong Vocational Interest Blank, built by psychologist E.K. Strong to help people leaving the military find work. For decades, men and women filled out separate forms. In 1974 David Campbell merged them into one form, and his name went on the cover as Strong-Campbell. A later revision dropped his name, and the test has gone by the Strong Interest Inventory, or SII, ever since. The dates are below. The Strong Interest Inventory entry on Wikipedia counts six revisions in all.

So why do people still type the old name? It is printed on old school records, it appears in older career books, and counselors who trained decades ago still say it out loud. If a parent, teacher, or HR form asked you to take the Strong-Campbell, they almost always mean today's Strong.

How the Strong-Campbell became today's Strong Interest Inventory

It is the same test family with a newer form. Here is the timeline, as recorded in the Wikipedia history of the test:

• 1974: the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) joins the men's and women's forms.
• 1985: a revision adds more jobs that don't need a college degree.
• 1994: the name changes to the Strong Interest Inventory.
• 2004: the current edition comes out.

That 2004 edition is organized around John Holland's six interest types, often called RIASEC. The question bank, the job list, and the comparison groups have all been refreshed, so a score from the Strong-Campbell years will not line up neatly with a score you get now. Is the old version still used? Not under that name. The test itself is still common in high schools, colleges, and career counseling offices, and The Myers-Briggs Company publishes it.

The test is a long list of quick gut reactions. Nothing is graded, and you can't prepare for it. You say how you feel about each item, and the scoring does the comparing.

Test length, answer scale and scoring

Today's version has 291 items. They cover 107 occupations, 46 school subjects, 85 activities, 28 leisure pursuits, 16 types of people, and 9 statements about you. For most items you pick one of five answers: strongly like, like, indifferent, dislike, or strongly dislike. Most people finish in 30 to 45 minutes, and it reads at about a ninth-grade level, so a high school student can take it without help.

You can't score it by hand. A computer compares your answers with large reference groups and prints four layers of results. The top layer is 6 General Occupational Themes. Below that sit 30 Basic Interest Scales, such as writing, sales, or mechanics. Then come 244 Occupational Scales covering 122 occupations, where your likes are matched against people in each job. Last are 5 Personal Style Scales, which describe things such as whether you prefer working solo or in a group, and whether you like to lead. A certified counselor usually goes through the report with you afterward, because the layers can disagree and the disagreements are often the interesting part.

The six RIASEC interest themes it measures

The top layer of the report uses Holland's six themes. Most people end up with three letters that sum up their strongest themes, such as SAE or IRC. The O*NET interest profiles list real jobs under each theme if you want to explore further.

Realistic covers practical, physical work: tools, machines, plants, animals. Investigative covers research, data, and figuring out how things function. Artistic covers writing, design, and open-ended making. Social is about helping others learn, heal, or get through a hard stretch. Enterprising is about pitching ideas, closing deals, and running things. Conventional covers keeping records, numbers, and systems in order.

A high theme score means your likes resemble the likes of people in that kind of work. Use it to decide where to start looking, not as a list of jobs you are meant to do. If the theme names are new to you, our explainer on career areas of interest walks through each one with examples.

A Strong Interest Inventory SII report is mostly ranked lists. Your themes come out in order, your basic interests come out in order, and the occupations come out sorted by how closely your likes match people already doing them. The useful part sits near the top. Look for occupations where your theme scores and your occupational scores agree, because that overlap is the strongest signal on the page.

Interest is the one thing it scores

The report covers interest. It shows which fields keep your attention and which working people you resemble in what you enjoy, and that is solid, useful information, especially if you are seventeen and have never held a full-time job.

It leaves out three things. First, ability: a top score for engineering does not mean you will pass calculus. Second, personality type, which is a separate test. Third, how a job's daily conditions will sit with you. Pace, how often you deal with people, how often you get pulled off task, how many decisions you make alone. None of that is on the form.

Liking a field vs. lasting in it

Someone scores high on Social and goes into nursing. They love their patients. Three years in, they are worn out, and the patients are not the cause. Twelve-hour shifts, constant interruptions, and charting at the end of every shift are. Their interest result was right. The daily setup was the problem, and the test never asked about it.

The same thing happens in offices. A person drawn to Investigative work lands an analyst job and finds the role is mostly meetings and quick turnarounds, with little time to think deeply. Or a person high on Enterprising takes a sales role and discovers they like persuading people face to face but dread cold calls. The field matched. The day-to-day did not.

An interest test is good at the first question: which field? It was not designed for the second one: once you are in that field, will the way the work is set up suit you? Many careers stall on that second question, and answering it needs another tool.

The Strong-Campbell works best when you have lots of options and little work history. It produces an ordered list of fields to explore, which is exactly what you need when everything is still open.

Best fit: early exploration vs mid-career decisions

High school students picking a path and college students picking a major gain the most. They have strong opinions about subjects and hobbies but few jobs to compare against, so a list of fields where people share their likes is a real help. Career changers at the very start of a search also use it to spot fields they had never considered.

It helps less mid-career. If you have worked for ten years, you usually know what interests you. Your question is different: why did a job that seemed right when you took it wear you down, and what kind of role would not? An interest list can't answer that, because it asks how you feel about work from the outside, never how you behave on the job.

A quick note on the strong interest inventory vs Holland code question. The Holland code is the three-letter summary. The Strong is one test that produces it, along with far more detail. Our page on Holland Code vs Strong Interest Inventory covers that difference in depth. For scale details, see the Strong Interest Inventory career test page.

What each test measures, side by side

The Strong Interest Inventory and Myers Briggs Type Indicator come from the same publisher and are often given as a pair, but they measure different things. The Strong looks outward: which fields and activities you like. The MBTI looks inward: how you prefer to gather facts and reach decisions, summed up as one of 16 types built from four letters. A counselor might use the Strong to suggest fields and the MBTI to explain why some roles in those fields will feel easier than others. Neither one measures ability. For the MBTI side in more detail, see our Myers-Briggs career test guide.

Ways to take it without paying

The full Strong is not free on the open web, but plenty of people take it at no cost. The most common route is a campus career office, which often includes it for enrolled students or charges a small fee. Some employers and outplacement programs include it as a benefit. The publisher has also offered a much shorter version called SuperStrong.

For a free interest test with no strings, the O*NET Interest Profiler, a free government tool, uses those same six themes and links each one to real occupations. It is a fair stand-in when the full Strong is out of reach.

What you will pay outside a school

Prices vary widely. Published quotes run from about $13 at some campus centers to $300 or more when a private counselor bundles in an interpretation session. Most of that spread is the interpretation, not the questionnaire. If you do pay for the full version, pay for the walkthrough too, because the report is dense and hard to read alone.

Places that still give the Strong

Three places offer it: a school or campus career office, a certified career counselor or coach, and some workplace development programs. When you book, ask which edition they use. A few offices still hand out older forms, and the newer edition has fresher job lists and comparison groups.

Once you know your interests, the next question is whether a role's daily work will suit you. Pigment picks up there. It asks how you think through problems, make decisions, and work alongside people, then points to settings and roles that match those patterns. For anyone deciding a next move after years in the workforce, this is usually the half the Strong never covered.

An Interest Test Shows the Field. This One Shows How You Work

Answer the questions online tonight and read your 36-page report as soon as you finish. One payment of $79.

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