About this app
What this is
A self-exploration tool for career values. It walks through a five-part protocol: a values questionnaire, six written incidents, an environment comparison against occupation profiles, two bounded real-world tests, and a review. It is not a diagnostic instrument, and it is not for hiring or screening.
What it will not do
It never produces a type code, an ideal career, or a single winner. It does not report a percentile and does not compare you with other people. Its output is your own values hierarchy, a ranked fit table, and a set of claims you can test.
The method
- Life values: the values questionnaire, read as a hierarchy centred within person.
- Work values: a 20-statement card sort with a forced distribution, ranked ipsatively.
- Behavioural evidence: six dated critical incidents, coded against the hierarchy.
- Environment: two independent fit axes against occupation profiles — needs against reinforcers, and abilities against requirements.
- Tests and review: bounded real-world tests, a retest tracker, and a printable sheet to take to a counsellor.
The two fit axes are always reported separately. They are never collapsed into one score.
What to expect from the results
The hit rate of interest instruments for career choice is around 50% overall and around 40% predictively (Hanna & Rounds 2020). Career-choice interventions as a whole produce d ≈ 0.35, a small-to-medium effect (Whiston et al. 2017). This app is built to rule options out and to surface trade-offs, not to name an answer.
How your answers are handled
Everything you enter stays in your browser's localStorage. Nothing is transmitted to a server, because the app has no server. There is no account, no sync, and no telemetry. You can export your answers as JSON and import them again on another device.
No analytics and no third-party tags are loaded on the instrument, incident, exploration, tests, fit, review, or prep-sheet pages. The privacy claim is meant to be literally true.
Licences
This app is permanently free and non-commercial. That is a licence requirement, not a preference: the values instrument is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, which forbids commercial use and derivative works. Its item text is reproduced verbatim and is never reworded or abbreviated. Occupation content is derived from a public database under CC BY 4.0, curated and translated by this project.
Limitations
- The values instrument does not achieve scalar invariance across groups, so absolute scores are not comparable between people. Only your own centred rank order is shown.
- The humility value is low-reliability, and the power/achievement distinction fails to differentiate in a substantial share of samples, including the Russian samples. The app flags these rather than reporting them at full confidence.
- Russian occupation titles and explanatory text are our own translation and are unvalidated.
- The occupation set is a 150-occupation subset, not the full database.
Nothing here is clinically approved, normed for your population, or a promise of any outcome.
Disclaimer
This tool supports career exploration, planning, and counselling. It is not intended for hiring, screening, promotion, or any other decision made about another person.
Portrait Values Questionnaire — Revised (PVQ-RR) by Shalom H. Schwartz. Item text is used verbatim and unmodified. Published in A Repository of Schwartz Value Scales with Instructions and an Introduction, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, vol. 2, iss. 2, art. 9 (2021). Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
This app includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database and the O*NET 23.1 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. Values Career App has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.