Origin
The ONET Interest Profiler is a vocational-interest assessment developed by the U S. Department of Labor's National Center for ONET Development. It operationalises John Holland's RIASEC theory of vocational interests, which organises both people and work environments into six types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (Holland, 1959, 1997).
Theory and structure
Holland's central proposition is that vocational satisfaction and stability increase when a person's interest profile matches the characteristics of their work environment (congruence). The six types are arranged in a hexagonal model in which adjacent types are more similar than opposite ones. The Interest Profiler presents work activities the respondent rates by preference, yielding scores across the six RIASEC dimensions that are then linked to occupations in the O*NET database.
Psychometric standing
The instrument was developed and validated by the O*NET program with attention to reliability and to fair functioning across groups (Rounds, Su, Lewis & Rivkin, 2010; Lewis & Rivkin, 1999). The underlying RIASEC structure is one of the most extensively researched frameworks in vocational psychology, with broad cross-sample support for the hexagonal model (Holland, 1997; Nauta, 2010).