Can A Visual Career Test Show Your True Colors?
April 14th, 2010
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Forty years ago, Richard Bolles asked job seekers “What color is your parachute?” It turns out that he may not have been speaking metaphorically.
The Dewey Color System offers a free career test based entirely on color preferences – just spend a minute clicking on the colors you like most or least. They claim it is now the world’s most accurate career test.
Compared to the general public, CEOs are three times more likely to choose magenta, three times less likely to choose red, and three and a half times less likely to choose yellow.
What does this mean? According to the Color Career Counselor test, CEOs are more sensitive and private than average, less likely to be dominant or a perfectionist, and more likely to be emotionally unstable.
The makers of this test say it measures 16 personality factors, including independence, anxiety, self-control, extraversion, and tough-mindedness. They also say it may identify things such as overeating tendencies or emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
Its supporters say that this simple test is as valid as the much lengthier Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (not a career test, BTW) and Gallup StrengthsFinder, and much harder to influence. Some people have called it eerily accurate, others have likened it to horoscopes.
I gave it a try to see how accurate it was for me. (It asks for an email address at the end, but it’s optional, and you have to skip past one ad). The results were mixed at best.
For my best occupational category, it said:
You’re a CREATOR
Keywords: Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional
Check, kind of.
For my second best occupational category, it said:
You’re a SOCIAL MANAGER
Keywords: Tactful, Cooperative, Generous, Understanding, Insightful, Friendly, and Cheerful
Um, no.
And as with any career test I’ve ever seen, the list of suggested occupations is so ridiculously broad as to be useless.
While I wasn’t wowed by my results, I think color preference probably does say something about you. But for now, a good old fashioned verbal test seems more likely to show your true colors.
Photo by tibchris
April 15th, 2010 at 1:23 am
Hey Hunter,
Hehe I’ve seen a couple similar tests and you’re right – they’re fun for the sake of playing around with, but I think my results were pretty underwhelming as well
I remember one that I really liked basically asked how often you like to interact with people, whether you want autonomy, whether you want to solve new problems or have a routine etc. It was exhausting.
And at the end, it said I think it was reasonably accurate, but I think the best test is just actually doing the worst aspects of the job. If you enjoy those, then the job is for you
. Like say, debugging frustrating code. Even though I don’t like it, I don’t dislike it enough – and often it is pretty rewarding 
April 15th, 2010 at 2:14 am
Yeah, I’m with you and Sid here, Hunter, those tests are *way* too vague. Like you, I got “Creator” as the top choice. I then got “Persuader”, which I’m not too convinced by! — “Witty, Competitive, Sociable, Talkative, Ambitious, Argumentative, and Aggressive”
(Maybe I’m just suppressing my argumentative and aggressive side, though…
)
I suspect the colours I like to look at differ depending on my mood, too.
April 15th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I find the study of people, what motivates them, and how they change fascinating, so this test was really fun.
I actually liked this color test better than the Myers Briggs Indicator. My “best jobs” were more accurate with the color test than with the Myers Briggs.
Even though it says it can’t be influenced as much as other tests, my color preferences do change and in the fall I would probably choose differently.
April 15th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
I checked the site. I think it sucks. The colors are not even accurate. For instance, their “magenta” looks like purple. And red, blue, yellow are not true primary colors.
April 15th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
I love this stuff that tells me it knows what I like and where I should work. =) While I do understand the research that goes into many of these tests, I still feel that verbal tests are much more accurate.
@Akemi, I laughed when I read your response. I thought that too. What if other people have their screens calibrated differently? What if they were color blind?
All in all I still think these tests can provide some feedback but testing by a variety of different methods may be more effective and reliable.
April 16th, 2010 at 1:26 am
@ Sid, that’s a good way to look at it. No job is going to put you in a flow state all the time – they all have their down moments. And if you can deal with them, you’re probably on to something.
@ Ali, glad we’re able to resist the Forer effect. Hmmm…argumentative and aggressive? I think you’ve got some work to do if you want to make those descriptions accurate, though hopefully you’ll choose to remain polite and cooperative!
@ Julie, I always cringe when I hear people recommending the MBTI to determine possible careers. I think something that measures your strengths would be much more appropriate. I’m sure our color preferences do change, but I wonder if the test accounts for that…like if people tend to flip between red and yellow, but not between red and magenta.
@ Akemi, I thought the colors looked a bit off too, starting with the first page – their blue is pretty pale, and their red has some orange in it. What are the true primary colors? I’ve always heard that red, blue, and yellow are the primary colors for things that reflect light (like paint), while red, blue, and green are the primary colors for things that emit light (like monitors), though cyan, magenta, and yellow are often used too. I’ve also heard that the choice of primary colors is somewhat arbitrary, and does not result from the actual properties of light.
@ Heather, the article I read says that of the 877 CEOs who took the test, four men and one woman were at least partially colorblind. One of them says the results were still bang on, though it doesn’t say about the others. I agree, this test is just one source, and probably not the most accurate one.
April 16th, 2010 at 11:22 am
This one gave me a chuckle – I have no idea how accurate this is at all. Mine was pretty close with a Creator primary and Organizer secondary, but that is just one persons result.
For more accurate personality type stuff, I’ve found the Enneagram to be especially enlightening. It has a great classification system and a pretty broad spectrum of possibility.
April 18th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
@ Jonathan, I don’t know much about the Enneagram, but I just took a test online. It says I’m a 5. Another site told me that my MBTI type (INTP) correlates with 5 on the Enneagram.
April 20th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
The true primary colors of paints are magenta, cyan, and yellow. The practical people in the printing business use this set of colors because otherwise things don’t work. Art schools teach this, too, of course. The problem is regular schools teach kids the lie that primaries are red, blue and yellow because — gosh — that is how it is taught before.
The primary colors matter. You don’t need to believe me or anyone to find the true primaries. Just pick up some paint and mix them. When you mix two true primaries, you get clean secondaries. Mix that with the third primary color and you get a completely neutral dark gray.
Because kids are given red and blue as primaries, they can never mix beautiful purple. It’s not their fault, but many think it is and quit loving art. Shame.
April 29th, 2010 at 6:24 am
This is a really interesting sounding test. To be honest. I think that it might be a little like a Horoscope. You can agree with anything it says.
May 16th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
[...] month I wrote about a career test based on color preferences. While I wasn’t much of a fan of that test, I like how it’s hard to influence. If you [...]
April 4th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
Huh. I got Creator first and the social thing second too. Creative, yes, definitely. Social whatchamacallit? Err, on which planet would that be exactly? I’m very much an introvert, and a fairly asocial one at that!