How the career lens works
Occupational Families
The 263 individual occupation Families as classified by ESCO / ISCO-08 at the 4 digit code level, grouped at this and the more granular occupational Archetypes level below that, based on the Big Five personality summaries of a very large sample already working in the role. Tap or hover over a family to see its definition and archetypes.
Role Archetypes
Each Occupational Family is divided into Role Archetypes, which group roles further based on more fine-grained similarities of personality facets. Tap or click the Family name to view that category, or click any of the Archetypes to view its profile page.
Hover over or tap a family to see its archetypes.
How it works
To arrive at your best fit role family and archetypes, for the questions and assessment we utilise Oracular, eyeYou's proprietary Big Five personality assessment. Oracular measures the five broad personality factors and twenty facets beneath them. It takes about 8 minutes, and features sixty questions in all. For personality scores to make sense your raw score per facet and factor is compared to the Oracular normative comparison group, and these provided to you with each completion of Oracular in the first instance, and are then used to inform the occupational family and role archetypes that your profile naturally fits best.
Profiles and occupations
The full occupation list for Career Lens is sourced from and linked back to the official occupational record in the ESCO database, the European Commission's classification of occupations. ESCO and the ISCO-08 international standard share the same four-digit occupation codes to allow backward searchability and consistency. Big Five score summaries for each occupational group was sourced from a published study from Tartu University researchers, found in the Tartu JobProfiles personality profiles (Anni, Vainik & Mõttus, 2024), built from a robust and representative sample of 68,540 working people. These published scores were implemented first to conduct role grouping analyses via confirmatory factor analysis and other related methods, and then second to directly inform personality score mapping logic, meaning these matches are empirically derived, rather than just theoretically. Matching uses the pattern of your strengths relative to each other (using mean centering among other techniques), rather than the absolute 'magnitude' of your scores without any other context.
Families and Archetypes Wheel
Roles and positions in the real world are not as simplistic or neatly defined as any role description would suggest. All are unique with features and responsibilities that are not replicated anywhere else, and likewise share exact or similar tasks with adjacent roles. Such overlap means that categories of careers can effectively be infinite in number, forming a circumplex where the number of Families (sectors of the circumplex) can be determined by how descriptive or granular we would like the categories to be, and each broad category and subcategory shares some overlap with temperament and tasks with its direct neighbours. The same approach is used for Holland's career interest types, and other vocational and occupational interests and temperament matches. Families in the Career Lens group occupations by how people in them tend to think and work, not by industry, so a Family or one of its Archetypes can hold roles from very different sectors.
Within each family, occupations are grouped using their full 20-facet pattern into archetypes: 46 in total. Each archetype holds at least four occupations from the ESCO / ISCO-08 4 digit categories, with sample sizes of at least 400 people, so it rests on robust and valid evidence. Each Archetype is defined by the two facets that most set it apart from the rest of its family: a key facet and a supporting facet. Neighbouring Archetypes overlap, as real careers do, which is why you'll usually match several.
How matching works
The lens describes how your personality fits occupations as people in them typically are, wihch indicates those scores are representative of people who are on average a behavioural fit with the role, and have a natural interest also. Initially your profile is placed in its natural broad Family out of the 6 overall, and then the closest fit for Archetype based on how closely the facets in your profile sits to them. You are provided with a number of natural fit profiles, where your profile is similar across all facets without any being more than a short distance from the profile, or a developmental stretch, where your broader profile fits very well, but one or two specific facets would need conscious effort to bridge the gap. Most often a Career Lens will provide you with up to 4 Natural Fit Archetypes, and one Developmental Stretch.
Your standard and complimentary result shows your Oracular personality profile, your career family and best-fit archetype with your match, the facets that define it for you, the occupations behind it, your other close matches, and your developmental stretch roles. A premium report is also available and adds detail on why your profile lands where it does, each defining facet read against the role with practical recommendations, an overview of the occupations in depth, with links to those profies.
Who built it
Career Lens and its foundational personality inventory Oracular was designed and built in Australia by Dr Ian Haslam.
Occupational benchmarks sourced and cited from Tartu JobProfiles data (Anni, Vainik & Mõttus, 2024).
Dr Ian Haslam
Founder & Principal Psychologist
Dr Ian Haslam is an Organisational Psychologist and has enjoyed building tools and resources, supporting test-takers and lighting pathways, and educating on the many ways and complexities of human psychology for over 15 years.
Read more on our About pageFrequently asked questions
References
- Anni, K., Vainik, U., & Mõttus, R. (2024). Tartu JobProfiles: personality profiles of 263 occupations.Journal of Applied Psychology, 110(4), 481–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001249
- Tracey, T. J. G., & Rounds, J. (1995). The arbitrary nature of Holland's RIASEC types: A concentric-circles structure. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 42, 431–439.
- Cronbach, L. J., & Gleser, G. C. (1953). Assessing similarity between profiles. Psychological Bulletin, 50, 456–473.
- European Commission. ESCO: European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations.
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