Career Key Discovery Manual

Basic Facts About the Assessment

Career Key Discovery’s assessment is a scientifically valid measure of John Holland’s six personality types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional. Holland’s Theory of Career Choice is one of the most respected and widely-used career theories by professional career counselors.

CKD is a career interest inventory that contains 27 questions and takes about 10 minutes to complete. It is suitable for 13 year olds to adults. CKD is based on an older version of the inventory called the Career Key Test (CK).

In 1987, Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, NCC first developed and published CK as a paper-pencil version. In 1997, he launched the first online version. The newest version is Career Key Discovery (CKD), launched in 2016 on a cloud-based platform in Microsoft Azure. Following modern principles of agile development, it is continuously updated.

Career Key’s classification system for matching occupations and education programs is described in the Careers and Education Programs section of this knowledgebase, as well as the downloadable Career Key Manual (see below).  A new, 4th Edition Classification System was released in Career Key Discovery in August 2022.

Reliability and Validity

Published research shows CK is a valid and reliable measure of Holland’s six personality types as well as helpful to discoverers deciding on a career path. To see reliability and validity details and citations, please download the Career Key Manual and see pages 23-24.

User Experience, Student-Transitions Versions

Having worked as a counselor and supervised counselors in K12, college career services, and workforce development, Dr. Jones designed CK to take a short time to complete. It makes career exploration easier and more rewarding for both discoverers and counselors. Research shows people are more likely to complete assessments with fewer questions.

2015 – 2024 Usability Studies

In preparation for a new version of CK, several usability studies were conducted by General Assembly in Seattle and one of the top global user experience and design systems firms, EightShapes.

Improvements were identified that would not impact the psychometric characteristics of CK’s inventory section. Those improvements were applied to the design and delivery of the new product version, Career Key Discovery (CKD), launched in 2016. A separate handset design was created.

Since then, usability studies with EightShapes and UX designer Lillian Coutts were conducted in 2019, 2020 and 2022 including an updated Explore Careers and Education programs’ sections. At the same time, disability accessibility was checked and updated to comply with WCAG 2.1 Standards.

In the Summer of 2024, Career Key conducted a usability study with high school and college students to refresh earlier data and to begin testing a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot.  Also, Career Key did another review of disability accessibility standards and made changes to CKD’s user interface (UI) to match updates in WCAG 2.1.

Separate Student and Transitions versions of CKD

In 2021, separate versions of CKD were created to better address the different decision-making needs for two main audiences: those beginning their career journey (8th grade through early college) and graduating college students and adults returning to school or considering a career change. Both versions share the same inventory and classification system for occupations and education programs. The main differences are in terminology (use of the terms major vs. program) and the content focus of the Career Profile decision making tools.

Research Underlying CK’s Construction

Previous research guides CK’s content and form. Research has shown that career guidance instruments, like CK, generally have beneficial effects. (Holland, Magoon, Spokane, 1981) Likely factors include:

“…(a) exposure to occupational information; (b) cognitive rehearsal of vocational aspirations; (c) acquisition of some cognitive structure for organizing information about self, occupations, and their relations…” (p. 285).

Dr. Jones designed CK with all three of these in mind.

Using Holland’s Theory, CK helps discoverers understand the relationship between themselves and occupations and education programs.  This emphasis begins with the more general idea that choosing a career or education program is a matching process, finding one that best fits the discoverer.

Hundreds of studies have investigated Holland’s Theory (Ruff, Reardon, Bertoch, 2008), and support many of its key concepts. One of these, “congruence” — the extent of the match between personality type and a career/education choice — is positively correlated with career and educational success and satisfaction.

So, for discoverers to get the benefits of a close match, they need an accurate (valid) Holland assessment like CK.

Assessment Structure

In taking CK, discoverers assess their resemblance to the six Holland personality types by combined results to two types of questions.

First, discoverers rate how well statements about each of the six personality types describe themselves. The statements are drawn from John L. Holland’s theory (1985a, 1997) in which he describes each type according to four characteristics:

• Preferred activities,
• Competencies,
• Self-perceptions, and
• Values.

Second, discoverers indicate which jobs appeal from a carefully selected list that represents the six Holland personality types. (Holland, 1985a; 1997. Holland’s original measure, the Vocational Preference Inventory, used this approach exclusively.)

Then, for each occupation selected, discoverers confirm their level of interest. This exercise identifies a person’s level of interest in occupations and does not serve as their final list of choices.

At the end of the CK assessment, discoverers see results of all their responses, including the scores for all six personality types.

The Career Key Manual

The Career Key Manual includes more details about reliability, validity and Career Key’s unique classification system for occupations and education programs. To download the Career Key Manual (2015), click here.