Together with Runourcode GmbH and the Chair of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Bamberg, magnolia psychometrics announces the release of the Career Atlas (previously: Interaktiver Laufbahn-Atlas in German), a free web app for career orientation.[1]
Most tools and assessments in career orientation rely on psychometric testing to match a person’s abilities, interests or skills to job requirements. Others leave job seekers to sift through vast catalogs to find career paths they might be interested in.
In contrast, the Career Atlas was designed to lower the burden on job seekers and let them explore the occupational landscape freely. Users answer a few open questions about themselves in their own words, for example what they enjoy, what they are good at and where they would like to work. The app then uses state-of-the-art natural language processing to compare their answers with over 3,200 occupational descriptions from the German Federal Employment Agency. The results are drawn on a map, where occupations closer to the center indicate a better fit.
Try the Career Atlas here: huggingface.co/spaces/magnolia-psychometrics/career-atlas.
Why career orientation needs a new map
Careers have become less linear. People change employers, sectors and occupations more often than a generation ago, and the boundaries between job roles keep blurring.[2, 3] At the same time, the fit between a person and their work matters, since research links it to job satisfaction, health and the ability to keep working.[4]
Career counseling helps people make these decisions,[5] but it is a scarce resource, and many existing digital tools presuppose a target occupation to search for. Assessments like interest inventories, on the other hand, ask everyone the same closed questions and leave little room for what makes an individual biography unique.
Here, the Career Atlas offers the best of both worlds. It is low-threshold enough to be used on a phone, alone, at any time, and open enough to take in whatever a person considers relevant about themselves.
How it works
The app asks seven open questions, for example about interests, skills, preferred tasks and places of work. Users can give several answers per question and move on whenever they like.
A fine-tuned language model translates both these answers and the descriptions of each occupation into a shared representation of meaning. It then estimates how closely every occupation matches what a person has written. The approach builds on our earlier finding that language models can infer how psychological texts relate to one another from the text alone.[6]
The occupational data come from BERUFENET, the occupational information database of the German Federal Employment Agency. Each match therefore leads to an established, faithful description of what the work and the training involve.
Use cases
Career counseling sessions
In a counseling session, the Career Atlas works as a structured conversation starter. Counselor and client can fill in the questions together, look at the map and talk about why certain occupations appear, and why others the client expected do not. Because the input is free text, the session starts from the job seeker’s perspective and with the topics they prioritize in their working life.
Social cognitive career theory describes how people can rule out occupations prematurely, based on inaccurate beliefs about their own abilities or about what a job would offer them.[7] A map that shows nearby but unfamiliar occupations is a direct way to widen that range of considered options, which counselors can then explore with the client.
Guidance in schools, job centers and youth programs
The app is intended for anyone facing a career decision, e.g., school leavers, job seekers, people considering further training or a career change, and people returning to work. The youth employment initiative JOBLINGE in Leipzig is the project’s cooperation partner for work with young job seekers. In group settings, the Career Atlas gives every participant an individual result without requiring a lengthy test session.
What the Career Atlas is not
The Career Atlas is not a psychometric test and makes no diagnostic claims. Its suggestions reflect how a person describes themselves, so they are best treated as hypotheses to explore, not as recommendations. It complements career counseling, but it does not replace it. A counselor remains essential for interpreting the results, for weighing constraints such as finances or location, and for supporting people under strain.
Partners and funding
The project was funded for one year in 2024 by the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS) within the program “Civic Innovation: Gemeinsam sind wir KI”. It was developed by magnolia psychometrics in collaboration with Runourcode GmbH and the University of Bamberg.
