Person by environment fit is the most common approach used to support career decision making. In short, individuals learn how their personal characteristics can be “matched” to the occupations that correspond to those characteristics. Various career assessments have been designed to facilitate this matching process, including the O*NET Interest Profiler (designed to assess an individual's career interests) and the O*NET Work Importance Locator (designed to assess an individual's work values), both published by the U.S. Department of Labor. The assumed relationships between career interests and work values have not been thoroughly researched, especially as measured by these O*NET instruments. The present study sought to examine the relationships. In particular, it was hypothesized that each career interest would significantly correlate with one or possibly two theoretically related work values: Realistic with Working Condition; Investigative with Achievement; Artistic with Independence; Social Interest with Relationships; Enterprising with Status; and Conventional with Support and/or Recognition.

O*NET-based career assessments from a sample of over 52,000 individuals (assumed to be primarily high school students, given the nature of those usually assessed with such systems) were examined. O*NET career interest scales were correlated with O*NET work value scales to determine the relationships between these two related sets of constructs. While a number of correlations were significant at p < .01, no correlation was larger in magnitude than 0.05. Effect sizes (r²) were calculated, and no effect size exceeded 0.2% of variance explained. The overall conclusion reached was that career interests and work values, as assessed by the O*NET instruments, were substantially unrelated.

Three broad potential explanations for the lack of correlation were suggested: (1) limitations of the assessment instruments; (2) applicability of interest and value constructs to high school students; and (3) career interests and work values are totally nonoverlapping constructs. Evidence consistent with the first explanation was presented. The second and third explanation should be explored in further studies.