The UCAS Careers Quiz – personalised career matches

Using the power of real-world data, personality profiling and labour market information our new Careers Quiz matches your students to their best suited career options. And most importantly, we tell them which higher education courses others have studied to get them there.

Showing them the way 

For the very first time, students can accurately connect the dots between specific higher education courses and their perfect career. 

Most careers quizzes use personality traits and interests to determine which industry sectors might be good choices. But we know that’s only part of the support students need. They’re often left wondering how to get into those careers, what skills they will need, and above all, which are the best courses to get them workplace-ready.  

Personalised course matches and detailed labour market information 

Our quiz results show students’ their percentage match for each career, right down to individual job roles, meaning they can then find all the information they need. Including a role description and types of tasks involved, the hard and soft skills required, and the number of jobs available with accompanying salary ranges.  

To support your students on making their next steps, they’re also presented with course matches from UK universities and colleges. These are the courses people in those careers actually studied to get them into their chosen roles. 

It’s all driven by world-leading labour market and Graduate Outcomes data, so you can be sure that your students are getting truly personalised, real-time, real-world matches. 

Using the Careers Quiz in the classroom  

Covering two of the Gatsby benchmarks, ‘Learning from career and labour market information’ and ‘Addressing the needs of each pupil’, your students can save their results in their UCAS Hub to reflect, revisit and start planning next steps.

Take the quiz

Our supporting lesson plan 'Why shouldn't you be a water slide tester?' has been developed by expert careers advisers to encourage students to consider career options across all industry sectors and to appreciate the different routes and outcomes of their choices.

The questions 

The quiz asks students 30 questions about their interests and personality, which are answered on a scale from ‘Strongly Disagree’ to ‘Strongly Agree’. This generates their Personality Traits and 11 careers categories, with a percentage match to each. 

Students can then drill down into 30 pathways subsets, and then further into specific careers, again, all with a percentage match. For each career, they can discover: 

  • Salary scale, from entry level to highly experienced 
  • Number of jobs available in this sector, based on vacancies over the last 12 months  
  • Daily tasks  
  • Hard skills required 
  • Soft skills required 
  • University and college courses previous students completed in those sectors 
  • Related careers  
  • Specific course matches for that career from UK universities and colleges 

How are the results generated? 

We worked with Emsi Burning Glass, the world’s leading authority on labour market dynamics, to use Holland Occupational Themes to profile students and provide them with their personality profile and career matches. We then used Graduate Outcomes data to map Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes to Higher Education Classification of Subjects (HECoS) codes to show which courses previous students studied and what careers they went on to do. Finally, we used the soft skills vs course description and title of job vs title of course to determine relevancy of courses to job roles.