Transition Assessment: Interest Inventories

Interest inventories are questionnaires that ask a person to rate their interest in a wide variety of activities. The results tell about careers that people with similar preferences enjoy. There are thousands and thousands of interest inventories out there, and hundreds of them are good.

Try one!

Online inventories

- MnCareers Interest Assessment: This is a quick, 42-statement online quiz from Minnesota. You simply click thumbs up or thumbs down for each statement.
- O*NET Interest Profiler: This is an online questionnaire with 60 questions about what you like and don’t like to do. It's part of the wonderful mynextmove.org website.
- CareerZone Interest Profiler: A one statement per page interest inventory with happy/sad faces to rate the statements. There are 30-, 60- and 180-question versions. From the California Department of Education.
- Career One-Stop Work Values Matcher is an online card sort exercise that has you rank statements to define your ideal job. Work values are our beliefs about what’s most important in our work.

Prefer paper over online?

- O*NET has assessments you can download and print:
  - Interest Profiler
  - Work Importance Locator
- Student Interest Survey for Career Clusters (PDF, 6 pages, 2005) from Advance CTE. It identifies the top three Career Clusters of interest. Takes about 15 minutes to complete.
- When I Grow Up (PDF, 6 pages, 2015) is a simpler career cluster inventory, less words, more graphical. Compiled by Champlain Valley Educational Services in New York State. Career cluster exploration pages in the same style.
- For middle schoolers: Career Clueless (PDF, 2 pages) is a quick inventory to identify a Holland career code for a student.
- For elementary grades: What's My Bag? (PDF, 1 page, 1992) from Connections: A Transition Curriculum for Grades 3-6.

Prefer pictures over words?

Before using a picture-based inventory, be sure the student has the background to interpret the pictures.

- Pictorial Interest Inventory (PDF, 19 pages, 2020), from Champlain Valley Educational Services in New York State, is structured around eight different career fields. Free.
- Online Photo Career Quiz, from Truity, uses photographs of people in realistic environments both at work and leisure to identify career interests. The quiz identifies the primary career type and then offers search options for examples. Free.
- Picture Interest Career Survey, from Jist and Paradigm Education Solutions, is available in print or online. There is a cost. Scroll down to the bottom of their page to request a free sample for review.

Updated 6-29-26