A high conscientiousness score means you tend to plan, persist, keep things in order and think before acting, and at work that shows as reliability and finishing what you start. It is the one Big Five trait that predicts job performance across occupations, though the effect is modest and it says nothing about talent.
The evidence
Barrick and Mount (1991) meta-analysed studies of personality and job performance across five occupational groups, from professionals and managers to police, sales and skilled and semi-skilled work. Conscientiousness predicted performance in every group, with a small to moderate correlation; the other four traits predicted it only in some groups or not at all. Dudley and others (2006) looked beneath the overall score and found that the narrower parts of conscientiousness, in particular achievement and dependability, predicted performance beyond the global score, and that which of them mattered depended on the job and on the kind of performance being rated. The trait is not the only thing that predicts performance: Nye, Su, Rounds and Drasgow (2012) found that how well a person’s interests fit their work predicts performance and persistence too, and that is a separate measure.
What a high score does not mean
It is not a measure of ability or of how good your work is. The scale asks how you organise your effort, not how much you have or what it produces, and many people with middling scores do excellent work in bursts, late. It does not mean you are the right person for every job: Barrick and Mount’s correlation is modest, and roles that reward improvising, delegating and tolerating loose ends can be harder for very high scorers. It is not perfectionism driven by worry about getting things wrong; that belongs to neuroticism, and a very conscientious person can be relaxed. In a team, the costs of a very high score fall on colleagues as much as on you: a reputation for reliability can sit alongside irritation with people who work differently.
What it means for your results
The strip shows where your conscientiousness sits among 410,376 people. Under it the test lists six facets: self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline and cautiousness. Achievement-striving is the facet most tied to how people do at work, and dutifulness the one about obligation to others, so two people with the same overall score can be a driven finisher and a careful rule-keeper. If your score is high, the pattern across the six says which kind you are.
The Big Five test takes about twelve minutes and scores all six facets of conscientiousness with percentiles against the same sample.