Creative people tend to score high on openness to experience and on the artistic interest type, and the careers that suit them are the ones built around making something expressive: design, writing, music, performance, film and craft. The evidence says the trait and the interest point the same way, and that creative work also turns up inside jobs that are not labelled creative.
The evidence
Feist (1998) meta-analysed studies comparing scientists and artists with other people. Creative people in both fields were higher on openness, more autonomous and less bound by convention; artists in particular were lower on conscientiousness, more emotionally sensitive and less sociable than people who were not artists, while creative scientists were more conscientious than artists. Kaufman and others (2016) separated the two halves of openness, the aesthetic and imaginative side from intellect, and found that openness proper predicted creative achievement in the arts while intellect predicted it in the sciences. Nye, Su, Rounds and Drasgow (2012) found that vocational interests predict performance and persistence at work, and more strongly when the fit between a person’s interests and the work is measured than when interest alone is.
Two measures, one direction
Openness is a trait: what you are like. Artistic interest is a preference: what you would like to spend your days doing. The 120-item Big Five test scores six facets of openness, of which artistic interests and imagination are the two nearest to creativity; the career interests test counts how many of ten creative activities, from writing and composing to designing and performing, you would enjoy. Someone high on openness but low on the artistic type is often creative in another direction: the intellect facet and the investigative type describe the person who invents in a laboratory rather than a studio.
What a high score does not mean
Neither score measures talent, and neither says that only artistic jobs will do. Artistic jobs are fewer and more competitive than those of the other five types, and many people with artistic interests find their creative work inside other jobs rather than as the whole job. Feist’s averages are averages: the typical artist being less conscientious does not mean a careful, orderly person cannot make art, only that fewer of them describe themselves that way. A low artistic score is not a lack of creativity; it says the ten listed activities did not appeal.
What it means for your results
Read your artistic score alongside the type it combines with. Artistic with investigative points to work such as architecture and games design; with social, to arts teaching and community theatre; with enterprising, to advertising, marketing and producing. The artistic career page lists twenty UK jobs and the activities each involves, and your openness facets from the Big Five say which kind of creative appetite sits behind the interest.
The career interests test takes five minutes and shows all six interest types on strips, with your three-letter code mapped to UK jobs.