Holland codes: the six RIASEC interest directions
RIASEC describes career interests in six directions — Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and Conventional. A Holland code is the shorthand for those directions. Every page below groups O*NET occupations by the Interest High-Point (IH) code O*NET assigns each of them; they are lists, not rankings.
A code has one to three letters, written in order of strength. In O*NET Database 31.0, of the 923 occupations, 490 have three-letter codes, 413 have two-letter codes and 20 have only one — a short code is not an error, and no letter is invented to fill a third position.
The six directions
RRealistic
Hands-on work with tools, machines, and the outdoors
387 occupations
IInvestigative
Analyzing, researching, and solving problems
113 occupations
AArtistic
Creating, expressing ideas, and working with freedom
28 occupations
SSocial
Helping, teaching, and caring for others
129 occupations
EEnterprising
Persuading, leading, and making things happen
100 occupations
CConventional
Data, processes, and organized work
166 occupations
Every published code page
A code gets its own page when at least 8 O*NET occupations share the prefix. That rule yields 42 pages today; each item below shows the number of occupations it covers.
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Where the numbers come from
- Interest codes and typical education: O*NET Database 31.0 (CC BY 4.0), retrieved 2026-09-15.
- U.S. median wages and employment: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OES), May 2025 release, retrieved 2026-09-15 (public data).
- The occupation-side interest profiles are machine-generated: O*NET derived them with machine learning from work activities and related data (2023 report, linked below), not from analyst ratings.
- How this site selects and changes the O*NET data (CC BY 4.0): a page is published only for IH code prefixes shared by at least 8 occupations, and each page lists at most the 50 largest occupations by U.S. employment; education labels are reduced to the most common category in O*NET's education data and translated into English and Chinese. The wage figures are joined from BLS OES and are not part of the O*NET database.