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Ideal life design

Start from the life, not the job title

Most career tools start by asking what you do now, which is how people end up with more of what they already have. This one starts with the life you want: what you need to earn, where you need to be, how much freedom, how much risk. Then it shows you the real roles that fit it.

This is the whole instrument, not a taster. It runs to 61 questions across six sections, and each section tells you what it is reading and what it cannot tell you before it asks anything. Your place is saved as you go, so you can stop and come back — on this device only, and it clears itself after 30 days if you do not.

Start with my life See how you learn best
About 12 minutes, in six sections No signup to see your result Saved on your device, not on our servers, and cleared after 30 days

61 questions about your life. Real roles that fit it.

The method

The full instrument, five established frameworks, and exactly what they can tell you

This starts from the life you want rather than the job you have. It runs to sixty-one questions, built on five long-established constructs from career and personality psychology, and they are not those frameworks’ own questionnaires. The wording is ours.

Two counts get quoted for this instrument and both are true, so here is the reconciliation. You answer sixty-one screens. The item bank behind them counts sixty-eight, because the career-anchor screen spends a hundred points across eight anchors and each anchor is scored as its own item. Sixty-one is what you click through; sixty-eight is what gets scored.

A shorter nineteen-item version ran here until recently and it has been withdrawn. It was not a shorter measurement of the same thing, it was a weaker one, and the section below is specific about what changed.

That distinction is the difference between a real answer and a flattering one, so it is worth being precise about part by part.

The six parts, and what each is doing

  1. Your ideal life 10 questions

    What you need to earn, whether the work has to travel with you, how intense a period you are willing to work now, and whether the work has to visibly help someone. Each of those is asked twice, once in each direction, and a tenth question asks how settled the whole picture is.

    Practical constraints you set, not scores you are graded on. Two of them, the pay floor and location freedom, are used as hard filters on the roles we return. The rest are weights. Asking each one in both directions matters because wanting a high salary and being willing to trade salary away are different answers, and only the pair separates them.

  2. What energises you 18 questions, three per type

    Building things, getting to the bottom of why something works, making something original, teaching and helping, leading towards a goal, and bringing order to mess.

    Holland’s six vocational interest types (Nauta, 2010). Three items per type is the point at which a type score stops resting on a single answer, and the top three types in order form the code that joins your profile to occupations. Where the third type cannot be told apart from the fourth we report the two-letter read and mark the third tentative, rather than printing a three-letter code we cannot defend.

  3. How you are wired 20 forced choices

    Twenty either-or trade-offs between traits, with no neutral option, so you cannot agree with everything.

    Trade-offs between Big Five traits (Goldberg, 1992; McCrae and Costa, 1987). Each trait is scored as the share of its appearances you chose, so the number of appearances is what bounds how finely the trait can be read. Across twenty blocks each of the five traits appears between seven and nine times, which is enough to place you on a scale rather than in one of a handful of buckets.

  4. What you would least give up 1 question, 100 points across 8 options

    Spending a hundred points across autonomy, security, expertise, leading, building your own thing, service, pure challenge and lifestyle.

    Schein’s career anchors (Schein, 1996). This is the one screen that carries a whole framework intact, and it is why the authored count is sixty-eight rather than sixty-one: the eight anchors are eight scored items behind a single widget. It is a ranking within you, and it can never be a comparison against anyone else.

  5. How much you need to decide 6 questions

    How strongly you need to be the one deciding how the work gets done.

    The autonomy need in self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Six items on one question make this the steadiest single reading in the set. It is deliberately kept apart from the freedom to work anywhere and from the autonomy career anchor, because those are three different things and a role can satisfy one while fighting the other two.

  6. Appetite for risk 6 questions, three per axis

    How much financial uncertainty you will take on in work and money decisions, and how much stimulation you want in a day.

    Domain-specific risk taking (Weber, Blais and Betz, 2002). Risk appetite is not one trait, so these are reported as two separate readings and never added together. Someone who wants an interesting day on a predictable income is a coherent and common person, and fusing the two axes routes them into the wrong work.

Why these five frameworks

Holland’s interest types, the Big Five, Schein’s career anchors, self-determination theory and domain-specific risk taking are all long-established and heavily studied. They are the constructs the field actually uses when it asks what kind of work suits a person.

The reason to ask about fit at all is that fit predicts things. Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman and Johnson’s meta-analysis of person-job and person-organisation fit is the standard reference for that, and Judge, Heller and Mount’s meta-analysis links Big Five traits to job satisfaction. That literature is why these six parts exist rather than a list of job titles.

Why the short version was withdrawn

A nineteen-item version of this ran here and it has been taken down. Nineteen was never a psychometric choice. It was the fewest items at which every axis has some answer, so the scoring stops refusing the submission. That is a very different thing from every axis being measured, and the profile said it was complete either way, which is what made the short form read as sound when it was not.

Here is what it actually cost, stated in the same terms we use above. A trait score is the share of its appearances you chose, and on the short form each Big Five trait appeared exactly twice, so it could resolve exactly three values: none, half or both. A personality bar with three reachable positions is not a measurement, and a DISC letter was being printed off it. Interests ran at one question per type against a floor of three. The autonomy composite ran on one question instead of six. Both risk axes ran on one question each. And every reverse-worded item had been dropped, so a habit of agreeing with whatever is in front of you went entirely uncontrolled.

The trade was framed at the time as buying completion at the price of an internal number nobody sees. That was wrong on its own terms. The confidence figure the short form produced sat below the threshold that widens the shortlist and hedges the wording on every single submission, so the weaker instrument was quietly degrading the answer everybody got. The full form clears that threshold. It is longer, and the six section introductions exist so that the length is something you agreed to rather than something that happened to you.

What the full form supports, and what it still does not

What it now supports. Interests are read from three questions per type rather than one, which is the point at which a type score no longer rests on a single answer. Each Big Five trait is read from between seven and nine forced-choice appearances, so the trait bars resolve a real range instead of three fixed positions, and a DISC read built on top of them is defensible where it was not before. Eight of the items are reverse-worded, so agreeing with everything no longer looks like a consistent profile. Those are the four things the short form could not do.

What it still does not support, and this part has not changed. The career anchors are ipsative: you divide a fixed budget, so the numbers only mean anything against each other inside your own answers, and they can never be compared with anyone else’s. The two risk axes are reported side by side and are never added together. A single DISC letter is never reported on its own; you get the primary and secondary blend, and where the top two are close the wording speaks to both rather than picking a winner by rounding. A flat interest profile has its third letter marked tentative instead of being presented as settled.

And the largest limit is unchanged by any of this. The item wording is ours rather than lifted from the published questionnaires, so none of the reliability, norming or validity evidence for those instruments transfers to this. A longer form of our own items is a better instrument than a shorter form of our own items. It is not a validated one, and we do not describe it as one.

What happens to your answers

They are scored into a profile and matched against the roles in our library. Nothing is stored: this page is anonymous and the answers do not outlive the request.

The shortlist is then ranked, with a fit percentage and a reason per role. You see whatever comes back, including when the fit is weak, and the page says which it is. There is no signup wall in front of the answer.

What this is not

  • This is not a validated psychometric instrument and it is not a clinical assessment. It is sixty-one questions built on published constructs, and it is indicative rather than diagnostic.
  • The item wording is ours. None of it is lifted from a published questionnaire, which means none of the published reliability, norming or validity evidence for those instruments transfers to this, however many items we ask.
  • The DISC read is derived from the Big Five answers rather than measured directly, and it is only ever reported as a two-letter blend. Where the top two quadrants score close together the wording says so instead of naming a winner.
  • The interest code is a ranking of your own six type scores. Where the third type cannot be separated from the fourth we mark that letter tentative, which is a real and common result rather than a fault in your answers.
  • Nothing you answer is compared against anyone else. There is no percentile here and, with the career-anchor question in particular, there cannot be one: spending a hundred points is a ranking inside you and says nothing about where you sit against other people.
  • The two risk readings are separate and are never added together. This is your appetite for risk, not your capacity to absorb it, and what you can actually afford is a question about your circumstances that is not asked here.
  • The role library is not complete across occupations. Coverage is thin in some professions, and a match is only ever as good as the shelf it is drawn from.

References

Every reference below was checked against the publisher record for its identifier before it was written here, and every one links out so you can read it yourself. Where a paper is used as a frame rather than as data, the note under it says so.

  1. Nauta, M. M. (2010). The development, evolution, and status of Holland’s theory of vocational personalities: reflections and future directions for counseling psychology . Journal of Counseling Psychology, 57(1), 11 to 22.

    The review of Holland’s six interest types and the evidence around them. Behind the six "what energises you" questions.

  2. Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure . Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26 to 42.

    The Big Five factor structure the five forced-choice trade-offs are drawn from. The items themselves are ours, not Goldberg’s markers.

  3. McCrae, R. R., and Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 81 to 90.

    The evidence that the five-factor structure holds across different instruments and raters. Cited for the construct, not for our use of it.

  4. Schein, E. H. (1996). Career anchors revisited: implications for career development in the 21st century . Academy of Management Perspectives, 10(4), 80 to 88.

    The eight career anchors and the trade-off format behind the hundred-point question.

  5. Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior . Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227 to 268.

    Self-determination theory, and specifically the autonomy need: the question about how much you need to decide how the work gets done is asking about this construct.

  6. Weber, E. U., Blais, A.-R., and Betz, N. E. (2002). A domain-specific risk-attitude scale: measuring risk perceptions and risk behaviors . Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15(4), 263 to 290.

    The finding that risk appetite is domain-specific rather than one general trait. It is why the two risk questions are reported separately and never summed.

  7. Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., and Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals’ fit at work: a meta-analysis of person-job, person-organization, person-group and person-supervisor fit . Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281 to 342.

    The meta-analytic evidence that fit between a person and their work relates to satisfaction and intention to stay. The reason a fit-based tool is worth building at all.

  8. Judge, T. A., Heller, D., and Mount, M. K. (2002). Five-factor model of personality and job satisfaction: a meta-analysis . Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(3), 530 to 541.

    The meta-analytic link between Big Five traits and job satisfaction.

  9. Ofqual (2026). Find a regulated qualification (the register of regulated qualifications) . Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation. Live register, accessed August 2026.

    Every qualification named anywhere on this site is a real, regulated one read from this register. Zavmo is not an awarding body and does not invent qualifications.

  10. UK Standards (2026). National Occupational Standards . The UK National Occupational Standards repository, accessed August 2026.

    The skills spine under every role in the catalogue. National Occupational Standards are the published statements of what competent performance in an occupation looks like.

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