Validity of The Party Exercise for Determining Holland Codes

Abstract

The Party exercise, found on many career guidance websites and published annually in the best‐selling job‐hunting book What Color Is Your Parachute? (Bolles, 2020), claims to provide a quick and easy way to determine a person's Holland RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) code. We examined whether this commonly used exercise indeed accurately predicts Holland codes. Undergraduate students (324 women, 147 men) responded to The Party exercise and then the Self‐Directed Search (Holland & Messer, 2013). Results indicated that The Party exercise has some ability to predict some RIASEC types. However, the results do not support use of this popular exercise in lieu of a career assessment measure that has well‐established validity.