Career Compass
Major & Career Fit Assessment

Find the major that actually fits who you are.

A structured self-assessment built on established interest, personality, and work-values frameworks — matched against 121 major profiles, 248 real BLS-sourced career paths, and current 2026 hiring-market context. Not guesswork.

What gets measured

  • Interests — RIASEC / Holland Code (30 items)
  • Personality — Five Factor traits (20 items)
  • Work values — O*NET six-value model (12 items)
  • Academic standing — GPA band, strongest subjects
01

Holland Code (RIASEC)

John Holland's theory of vocational personality types, the same model underlying O*NET's Interest Profiler.

02

Five Factor Model

Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability — the leading trait model in personality psychology.

03

O*NET Work Values

Achievement, Independence, Recognition, Relationships, Support, and Working Conditions.

04

BLS Wage Data

National employment and wage figures from BLS's detailed occupation survey (OEWS), the same government dataset behind the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

On data integrity: every wage and employment figure in this tool comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (OEWS) — the detailed, occupation-level government dataset (248 occupations) behind the Occupational Outlook Handbook, cross-checked against O*NET. BLS's own newest release (May 2025 data, published May 15, 2026) confirms the national average wage has moved to $69,770; this tool's per-occupation figures reflect BLS's most recent fully detailed table and are labeled with their exact vintage rather than silently treated as current-day. Alongside the government wage data, a separate "2026 job-market signals" section on your results page draws on recent hiring-survey reporting (NACE, Handshake, ZipRecruiter, Federal Reserve Bank of New York) for faster-moving context — clearly labeled as distinct from the BLS statistics. Employer examples are well-established organizations named for illustration, not a ranked or exhaustive "top 10." See the Sources tab for full citations and their limits.
Career-Stage Earnings & Outlook

How pay actually changes over a career, specialty by specialty

National medians hide huge variation by career stage and by specialty. This deep dive breaks out starting, mid-career, and experienced-level earnings across nine career fields — medicine, technology, nursing & allied health, law, business & finance, engineering, education, creative & media, skilled trades, and public safety — not just the single BLS averages used elsewhere in this tool.

How to read these numbers — please read before using this data:
  • Sources beyond a single BLS average: Medical-specialty figures are drawn from the Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2026 (5,916 physicians surveyed) and the AAMC 2025 Survey of Resident/Fellow Stipends. Technology figures are drawn from the Robert Half 2026 Technology Salary Guide, which reports pay at three explicit experience bands (their terms: "low" = new to the role, "mid" = moderate experience, "high" = extensive experience/specialized skills).
  • "Starting" for physicians reflects the national residency/training stipend (AAMC, $68,166 for PGY-1, standardized nationally by Medicare GME funding), since that's the actual income during required training — not a projected first-attending salary, which no survey breaks out by specialty.
  • "Experienced/late-career" for physicians is estimated at +25% over the Medscape specialty average, reflecting the documented spread between survey averages and top-earning, often practice-owning physicians in the same specialty (multiple surveys, incl. Doximity, show 20–35% gaps between average and top earners) — this is a labeled estimate, not a separately surveyed figure.
  • Tech "mid-career" figures marked with * are an interpolated midpoint between Robert Half's published low/high figures where Robert Half didn't publish a separate "mid" number for that specific role; figures without * are Robert Half's own published mid-experience number.
  • Nursing & allied health, law, business & finance, engineering, education, creative & media, skilled trades, and public safety use a different, purely government-sourced method: for each occupation, "Starting" is the BLS OEWS 10th percentile national wage, "Mid-career" is the 50th percentile (median), and "Experienced" is the 90th percentile — May 2025 BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data. This is the percentile-band method BLS itself publishes for salary benchmarking; it isn't broken out by years of experience the way the Medscape/Robert Half surveys are, so treat the 10th/90th percentile as "typical entry-level pay" and "typical pay for the most experienced/highest-paid in the role" rather than a precise number of years.
  • 10-year outlook uses BLS's actual published Employment Projections (2023–2033), the only horizon BLS forecasts. There is no official 20-year BLS forecast. The illustrative 20-year outlook column simply compounds that same 10-year rate twice and is clearly a rough extrapolation, not a government forecast — treat it as a directional signal, not a prediction.
  • These are demand/employment-growth figures (how many jobs), not wage-growth forecasts. Nobody can reliably predict what a specific job will pay in 20 years, so this tool does not attempt to project future dollar salaries that far out.

Sources & Methodology

How this tool scores you, and where the numbers come from

Scoring logic

Your 30 interest items produce a 0–100 score on each of the six RIASEC types. Your top three types, in order, form your three-letter Holland Code. Each major in the database carries its own three-letter code (assigned using standard occupational-classification practice, the same approach O*NET uses to tag occupations). A major's base fit score is a weighted average of your scores on its three letters (50% / 30% / 20%, reflecting the letter order), then adjusted by up to ±10 points for overlap with your top two work values and up to ±12 points for overlap with your strongest academic subjects. The result is capped at 100.

Personality and academic-preference results are shown for self-reflection alongside your fit scores; they are not folded into the numeric ranking, since personality-major correlations are far weaker and less standardized in the research literature than interest-major correlations.

A note on limits

This is a structured self-report screening tool, not a diagnostic or predictive instrument, and it isn't a substitute for a licensed career counselor, school counselor, or academic advisor. Interest inventories are reasonably stable predictors of satisfaction with a field, but they say nothing about admissions competitiveness, cost, financial aid, or your specific institution's program quality. "Learning style" preferences are collected for informational context only — the learning-styles hypothesis (that matching instruction to a preferred style improves learning) is not well supported by controlled research, so this tool never uses it to affect your fit score.

Primary sources cited in this tool

    Your data

    This is a static, client-side tool. Nothing you enter is sent to a server or stored anywhere automatically. Use "Download my report" to save a PDF, or "Save progress" to download a JSON file you can reload later with "Load a saved report."