Career Anchors Test — Free 24-Question Quiz on What You Won't Give Up at Work

Career anchors are a concept from organizational psychologist Edgar Schein. Following a group of graduates over many years, he found that people had one condition they wouldn't easily give up, even as they changed jobs and roles. Like an anchor that holds a drifting boat in place, that condition holds their career choices steady. Schein (1990) organized these into eight anchors: technical/functional competence, general management, autonomy, security, entrepreneurial creativity, service or dedication to a cause, pure challenge and lifestyle.

Researchers are still debating how many anchors there are. A study of 1,847 Israeli working adults (Danziger et al., 2008) found that a nine-anchor structure, splitting entrepreneurship and creativity, fit the data better than eight, and later work has re-examined the structure (Barclay et al., 2013). This test's 24 items were newly written by Soundary based on Schein's eight concepts; none of the original inventory's items are used.

The result screen lists all eight anchors from highest to lowest, followed by what your top three and bottom two mean. What Schein emphasized is not what you're good at, but what you'd keep even if you gave up everything else. That's the core idea: a role that unsettles your top anchor is hard to stay satisfied with, however good the terms.

Anchors tend to sharpen with work experience, so if you're a student who hasn't worked much yet, read your result as the direction you're drawn to now rather than a fixed answer. Where a career interest test looks at what kind of work you enjoy, this test looks at the conditions you want to work under. Seen together, the picture of your path gets much clearer.