CareerQuest guide

CareerQuest helps people discover jobs through an online questionnaire. It analyses people’s interest in different types of work and matches these interests to more than 400 job profiles on careers.govt.nz.

CareerQuest helps users:

• see how jobs match their interests
• find out more about each job
• filter their results by industry and qualification level
• create a list of favourite jobs
• save and share their results.

• Try out CareerQuest

Users’ interest in different job aspects

CareerQuest looks at combinations of different aspects that make up a job, such as working outdoors or working with children, and filters results according to users’ interest in these aspects. 

A person may really like some aspects of a job, be OK with others, or have some things they'd prefer not to do at all.
For example, carpentry includes working with buildings, working with your hands, working outdoors and doing physical work. If a person likes all these things, carpenter is likely to be listed in their results.

Users’ answers

Answers to each question are compared with each job in our job profiles. Results are generated from each user’s own choices and are not related to other people's responses.

Combinations of aspects

Jobs are ranked by the combination of work aspects linked to each job, and the strength of interest a person has in these aspects.

For example:

• an interest in sport, recreation and teaching people will suggest the job of outdoor recreation guide/instructor
• an interest in air transport but no interest in customer service will eliminate flight attendant from job results.

The job rankings are not designed to say a person is better suited to the top job than a job further down the list. The jobs are ranked by being linked to more or less job aspects the user finds interesting.

Several jobs may also have a similar number of interest matches. For example, the first 20 jobs in the results may all have an equal number of interest matches.

Keeping options open

The neutral option is included for people who are unsure how they feel about some work aspects.

If someone is unsure, make sure they know the neutral option is a valid choice. Selecting neutral rather than no interest will keep interest areas open. Picking no interest will filter out jobs that feature this aspect of work.

For example, if a user responds neutral to farming animals and is interested in physical activity and working outdoors, they are still likely to get farming jobs suggested to them.

Filter results

Use the industry filter to sort jobs into industries and see similar types of jobs in their own list.

Users can also filter jobs by the qualifications need to do them. For example, a user could eliminate all jobs requiring a Master’s degree and above if they were not interested in studying for a long time.

Make sure students have a good understanding of the New Zealand Qualifications Framework to help them see how their career options will be affected depending on the level of education they aspire to.

Explore why an expected job has not shown up

Discuss with each user what career ideas they have before they use CareerQuest. Afterwards, they can compare their ideas with what CareerQuest suggested and explore similar jobs in the job profiles.

Sometimes their career ideas won't show up in their results. This could happen because:

• we don't have the job in our job profiles – try using different search terms to see if they can find something similar
• a person's response to the questions eliminates the job from the results. For example, if a person wants to be a carpenter, but selected no interest in working outdoors, carpenter would not show up in the results.

View and change answers

Users can click on view/change my answers and make changes to see how that affects their results. Users can also do the whole quiz again using the restart CareerQuest link.

During the quiz, encourage users to consider their neutral responses and whether they could move from neutral to uninterested or interested.

Try asking:

• What made you decide on neutral?
• If you had no neutral option, what would you choose instead?

Make a favourites list

Users can click on the heart icon next to the job to make a list of their favourites. All their favourites from all the tools they have used at careers.govt.nz will show up in this list.

Save and share results and favourites

Users can email, download and save a PDF of their top 25 job results. They can also save or share their favourite jobs. 

In the PDFs, click on each job to go to our job profiles and find out more about the role. Users can also complete CareerQuest without creating an account or signing in, but they can’t save, share or favourite their results.

For the best experience, users should sign in or create an account so they can:

• keep track of their results
• build a favourites list
• share their results.

Each user needs to enter an email address to complete the account registration form. There can only be one account per email address.

Each user needs to access their email account to activate their account and complete the registration process. 

If a user forgets their password, they will need to click the ‘forgot password’ link on the sign in screen, and log in to their email account to retrieve it.

• Sign in or create an account

CareerQuest teacher guide

What CareerQuest is, how the results were generated and how to help users get the most out of the tool.

• Download the CareerQuest teacher guide - mā te kaiako (PDF - 843KB)

CareerQuest user guide

What CareerQuest is and a helpful checklist for users to make sure they get the most out of the tool. 

• Download the CareerQuest user guide - mā te ākonga (PDF - 760KB)

CareerQuest FAQs

Find out more about CareerQuest.

• Frequently asked questions about CareerQuest

CareerQuest for large groups

If problems occur when a large group of people uses CareerQuest at the same time, your internet connection may be overloaded.

We suggest that if you have more than 100 CareerQuest participants:

• break them into groups of no more than 50
• start the groups at 15-minute intervals.

If CareerQuest still won't work, try making the groups smaller.