Whether you’re a student or an adult hoping to change trajectories, an online career quiz can help you get a better sense of what professional skills you have and what jobs could work best for your personality. So where can you find a high-quality career aptitude test?
In this article, we explain what exactly a job quiz does, present our very own short and easy career quiz, and introduce the top five career tests available for free online.
What Is a Career Quiz?
A career quiz, or job quiz, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: it’s a type of test that helps you figure out what kinds of careers/jobs could be good fits for you based on your interests, skills, and personality.
These quizzes usually ask questions on the following topics:
- What you value in a job
- What types of professional fields you’re interested in
- Your general work style (e.g., independent vs team-oriented, slow vs fast)
- What your strengths and weaknesses are in a workplace
A typical job quiz will consist of anywhere from five to 50+ questions, which can be worded in a variety of ways. Some quizzes will require you to agree or disagree with a statement, while others will ask you to choose the statement that best describes you.
Though many job quizzes do give you specific job options, some focus more on giving you a broad sense of the kinds of jobs—e.g., communicative jobs, technical jobs, and so on—that would work best with your unique abilities, skills, interests, and personality traits.
In this sense, think of a career test as a guide to help you explore potential career paths that you might not have thought of before or weren’t initially sure were well suited to you.
Of course, a job test isn’t only for high school and college students—if you’re considering changing careers, taking an online job quiz is a simple but effective way to help you gauge your options.
All in all, remember that a career quiz is really meant to be used as a general guide. If you’re not a fan of the job examples you get with your quiz, don’t worry—maybe these aren’t for you! However, they could still be used as jumping-off points to help you find other jobs better suited to your skills and interests.
PrepScholar's 5-Question Career Aptitude Test
Not sure what career to shoot for? Then take our PrepScholar 5-Question Career Quiz to get some ideas on what fields might be a good fit for you. Our quiz takes less than five minutes!
The 5 Best Free Job Quiz Websites
There are loads of career aptitude tests out there, but which ones are the best and most useful? Although the highest-quality career quizzes usually require a hefty fee, there are still some solid options for free job quizzes.
Below are our top five picks for free online career quizzes to try out.
The Princeton Review Career Quiz
- Number of Questions: 24
- Total Time: 5 minutes
This job quiz by famed test-prep company The Princeton Review is on the shorter side for career aptitude tests but still manages to give you pretty detailed results and solid job advice.
For each question, you must pick between two would-you-rather-type answer choices relating to your professional interests and work styles. At the end, you’ll get one of four categories for your "style" and "interest":
- Expediting
- Communicating
- Planning
- Administrating
"Style" refers to your professional strengths and how you prefer to get results, whereas "interest" refers to the kinds of things you’re drawn to in a work environment that keep you motivated and invested. In addition, you'll receive a huge list of 50+ recommended careers.
The only major downside with this career quiz is that you must make a Princeton Review account to access your results, but fortunately this is free and doesn’t take long!
O*NET Interest Profiler
- Number of Questions: 60
- Total Time: 10-15 minutes
Sponsored by the US Department of Labor, the O*NET Interest Profiler is a 60-question job quiz that focuses on how you'd feel about performing specific types of work duties and tasks using a like-dislike scale. Unlike other quizzes, you can go back and review or change your answers.
Results are given using the Holland Codes, which are six categories that describe your skills and interests in certain occupational paths. These work-related personality traits are as follows:
- Realistic
- Investigative
- Artistic
- Social
- Enterprising
- Conventional
You'll get tons of details on how you scored in each personality trait as well as numerous career recommendations.
123test Career Aptitude Test
- Number of Questions: 15
- Total Time: 5-10 minutes
Like O*NET, this career quiz by 123test gives you results based on the six Holland Code personality types, but its setup is more unique in that it uses pictures with captions instead of questions. Specifically, you’ll get 15 sets of four images; each image shows a task. For each question, you must choose one picture you like and one you don’t like.
At the end of the job quiz, you can select a minimum required educational level for the careers you want. Results are detailed, and you get a large number of career options to look through.
Truity Career Personality Profiler
- Number of Questions: 94
- Total Time: 10-15 minutes
This free career aptitude test by Truity contains a lot of questions but moves relatively fast. Here, you use a like-dislike scale to determine what kinds of duties and tasks appeal to you and don't appeal to you. You also decide whether certain statements and descriptive words apply to you.
Results are given in terms of how much you relate to four distinct work styles:
- Humanitarian
- Innovator
- Caretaker
- Pragmatist
- Building
- Thinking
- Creating
- Helping
- Persuading
- Organizing
A few careers are suggested near the bottom of the results page as well.
Unfortunately, most details will be hidden unless you pay for your full report. Still, the free version has quite a lot to offer!
16 Personalities Free Personality Test
- Number of Questions: 60
- Total Time: 10-15 minutes
This career quiz is an unofficial Myers-Briggs personality test that tells you which of 16 possible personality types you have. (Note that the official Myers-Briggs questionnaire costs money. While you can find many free tests online, this is one of the better "knock-offs.")
For each question, you get a spectrum of "agree" or "disagree" answers (try to avoid putting down "neutral" as an answer).
As for your results, you get a combination of four letters, indicating your personality type. Every personality type is determined based on the following factors:
- Extraversion (E) vs Introversion (I)
- Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N)
- Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F)
- Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)
The results with this job quiz are extremely detailed; there are even sections on potential career paths and workplace habits, with a few suggestions for specific jobs that might work for you.
What’s Next?
Need some help looking for jobs? Then check out these top job search websites. With these sites, you're sure to find your dream job in no time!
Think you might want a career in STEM? It's a very lucrative field, after all! See a list of more than 100 exciting STEM careers to get started.
Here at PrepScholar, we offer tons of step-by-step career guides. Learn how to become a doctor, a professor, a dentist, a librarian, and much more!
