What the Career Map is not

In Brazil, Law 4,119/1962 (art. 13) reserves to licensed psychologists the use of psychological methods and techniques for several purposes, including work on career choice and personnel selection. Resolution CFP No. 31/2022 regulates the instruments that only psychologists may use and the system that reviews them, SATEPSI.

The Career Map is an interest inventory for self-knowledge and career exploration, with educational content. It uses no SATEPSI instrument and no publisher’s items, and it is not a psychological test, a consultation with a psychologist or career counseling.

The Map describes affinities and shows occupations to explore, each with its reason. It neither points you to nor away from any profession, issues no document about you and discards no occupation: it only ranks them. There is no single profession meant for each person, and no questionnaire could find one.

The terms of use forbid a company or a school from using the result to decide about anyone. Answers are not sold or passed on to colleges, companies or recruiters.

The result describes preferences you stated today. Enjoying a field doesn’t guarantee good performance in it, and not enjoying it doesn’t prevent it. If you took the IQ test, the fields where you did best appear as a strength, but they never exclude or downgrade a career: the IQNorth IQ is an estimate with a margin of error, and ability develops with practice.

The 48 interest statements come from the Oregon Vocational Interest Scales (ORVIS), from the International Personality Item Pool, in the public domain. The original is in English; the Portuguese and Spanish translations are ours and have no published validation study yet. When there is enough data, the reliability figures for each scale will be added to the technical note.

The weights of the matching formula and the cutoffs of the readings (flat profile, quadrant, fast answer) are also provisional. Level is still absolute, because there is no norm of our own yet; it will come from the data.

The occupation profiles come from the O*NET® 31.0 database, built with data from the American labor market. An Ipea study that mapped O*NET® skills onto Brazilian occupations warns that what was measured there may not hold the same way in Brazil (Maciente, 2012). That is why the Map shows the profile as an international reference.

In this version the occupations don’t yet carry the Brazilian Classification of Occupations (CBO) code, and there is no salary range: we don’t have a measured Brazilian source ready, and we don’t use American salaries.

• Occupations: O*NET® 31.0 database and, for values, 30.2, under the CC BY 4.0 license. IQNorth selected 183 occupations, translated the names and wrote the descriptions. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA, which has not approved, endorsed or tested these modifications. IQNorth has no affiliation with the US Department of Labor.
• Interest items: ORVIS (IPIP), public domain (Pozzebon et al., 2010).
• Values, confidence and attention: IQNorth’s own statements.
• What was left out: the O*NET® Interest Profiler, because the license to translate and adapt it requires a validation study before launch; and the RIASEC Markers, because the authors limit free use to non-commercial purposes.

Research on interests shows real and modest links: 0.32 between interest fit and performance (Nye et al., 2017) and 0.19 with job satisfaction (Hoff et al., 2020). The six types replicate across several countries, but the hexagon doesn’t always (Rounds & Tracey, 1996; Teixeira & López Castillo, 2020). And interests change with new experience: it’s worth taking it again after 6 months.

If you are facing a hard choice, such as a degree, a career change or a fresh start, career counseling with a licensed psychologist goes beyond any inventory: it involves interviews, instruments approved for that use and follow-up. Look for a professional registered with the Regional Council of Psychology (CRP) in your region.