Career Path Quiz Results

Quiz details

The quiz had 10 items:

1. Being known as a top expert in my field of study is important to me

2. Doing what I’m passionate about is more important than making money

3. I want the freedom to work on whatever I want

4. Publishing isn’t enough, I want my work to make a positive difference in the world

5. It is more important for me to leverage my skills than to work on any specific topic

6. I don’t want my work to just make rich people richer

7. I prefer having a set structure to my work: team rituals, deadlines, goals

8. I want to create my own structure for how I do my work

9. I like fast-paced work

10. Being paid fairly for my work is important to me
    

You were scored on how well your values and interests fit into 5 types of roles: Academic, Corporate, Entrepreneur, Non-profit, and Government.

Scores range from 100% (perfect fit: go for these roles!) to -100% (perfect anti-fit: avoid these roles!).

Take a look at these sample results. If your data look like this, it means you're probably not a great fit for government, academic, or non-profits, but you would probably do well in a corporate environment or as an entrepreneur.

Who fits into these archetypes?

Career insights for PhDs

There is no “Destiny”: Actual scores for each career path ranged from -50% to 75%; no one got a 100% or -100%. Furthermore, a few quiz-takers messaged me with comments like "This is accurate for me now, but my answers would have been different a few years ago." No one’s really “meant” for any particular path, and even if they were, it's not forever. Keep an open mind and pay attention to your own shifting values and priorities!

You can be compatible with more than one thing: More than half (54%) of respondents scored higher than 36% (average score + 1 standard deviation) on more than one career path! Even if you start down one path, nothing is keeping you there for your next role.

Don’t take quizzes like this too seriously: When looking at which path each person scored highest on, the average “strongest fit” was 39%, but the weakest was 12%. This doesn’t mean that person can’t succeed at any of the career paths, but it might mean they should explore their values and priorities carefully before they make career decisions because they might have to make tradeoffs. Or it could mean that this was a poorly-designed quiz! Don’t let something like this hold you back from chasing what you want :)

Quiz response data

57 people completed the quiz. Here's how they answered the questions!

Quiz outcomes

Each of the 57 participants were sent a breakdown of their "fit" for each of 5 career paths. Here's a breakdown of the participants' highest-scoring category.

Why was academia so low? Two possible reasons come to mind:

1. Self-selection bias: A lot of people who read my content are folks who are not compatible with academia and thinking of exiting

2. Reality: The academic life really isn’t compatible with what most people want out of a career

Want a deeper dive?

This is really a surface analysis of the overall patterns in how people responded. I shared a question-by-question analysis of how to think about each of the questions in relation to different career paths to my mailing list.

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