What is a Holland Code

Career Development is an ongoing process of self-assessment, exploration of careers, making decisions about a career direction, acting on your decision and then continuously evaluating your choices.

The first stage of the career development process is finding out about yourself.

Most people think they know themselves fairly well, but when confronted with the need to make choices, they may lack the clarity necessary to find a career that matches their interests, abilities, and values.

Extensive research by John Holland has shown that ability and personality are the two main things that contribute towards job satisfaction. Holland’s conclusion was that for any personality type, the career most aligned with that type is most likely to be enjoyable and satisfying.

He identified six personality types, namely:

• Realistic
• Investigative
• Artistic
• Social
• Enterprising, and
• Conventional.

In this model an artistic personality type will be the opposite of a conventional personality type. Similarly, a person displaying an artistic personality type could also easily display social or investigative personality types.

In order to determine your personality type, you have to rank job activities in order of those that you like most to those that you like least. This will then help you to determine your three top personalities. When these are grouped, your Holland code is generated.

Holland has determined that certain personality types are mostly found within particular job categories. When you have determined your Holland code, the next step is to match the code to job categories, which we have already done for you in our Career Profiler.

The next step is to find out more about the different job categories. We provide a short overview of each, but you should also do your own research.

We have also linked courses that would prepare you for a specific job to the job categories in order to assist you in preparation for a particular career direction.

Enjoy!