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Most people are doing a job nobody designed.

It grew around them while they were busy getting on with it. You are more than what you do, but what you do takes up most of the week — and a great deal of unhappiness at work is simply spending those hours on things you would not miss.

The Role is four steps and about fifteen minutes describing the work you would actually choose. Not a personality test, not a careers quiz, and not a list of vacancies. A description of the work itself, in your own words and in hours, precise enough to say out loud to somebody.

Start — it is free How it works

Time

~15 minutesLonger if you get interested. You can stop and come back.

Cost

FreeNo account, no email, nothing to sign.

Where it runs

Your browserNothing is uploaded. Clear your browser and it is gone.

Vocabulary

2,366 kinds of workFrom O*NET, under forty-one plain headings.

Four steps, and every one of them makes you choose.

Open questions produce platitudes. You already know how to describe your job in the language of job adverts, because that is the only vocabulary anyone hands you — and it is the language of the thing you are trying to get away from. So this one makes you pick, and makes you discard. What you refuse turns out to say more than what you keep.

One good piece of work

A warm-up rather than a question. Two minutes on something you loved doing, to shift you out of the job you have and into the work itself.

The work itself

Choose what you would most enjoy from forty-one kinds of work. What you wrote suggests a starting point; the rest you find by looking.

What you need

Fourteen things people say they need from work. Keep five and rank them. The nine you let go are the useful part.

Your week

Spend your actual contracted hours across what you kept — after the inbox, the meetings and the mandatory training have taken theirs.

The point

A job description says what you do. A description of the role you want says what you would spend yourself on — which is why this ends in hours rather than adjectives, and why the week has to be a real one with the inbox and the mandatory training already taken out of it.

What it deliberately will not do.

Most of the design work here went into things the tool refuses. They are the reason it can be trusted with an honest answer.

01It never gives you a job titleTitles are the least stable unit in the labour market, and naming one collapses everything you have just described into a lookup. You get the work itself instead — which is what you would have to negotiate with anyway.

02It never asks about the job you haveDescribing your current role drags the whole exercise into diagnosis, and diagnosis is a different tool. This one is only about what you would choose.

03It never scores youNo type, no profile, no percentage, no verdict. The arithmetic is yours to read. You know things about your life that a web page does not.

04It never sends anything anywhereNo account, no upload, no analytics, not even a web font fetched from somebody else's server. It runs in your browser and stops there — which is the only way a tool like this is worth being honest with.

You can be doing this in about a minute.

There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to install. If you have fifteen minutes and somewhere quiet, that is the whole requirement — and if you have five, skip the warm-up and go straight to choosing the work.

Describe the role you want Other services

Includes information from the O*NET 30.3 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 licence. The Mantle Collective has modified this information; USDOL/ETA has not endorsed the modifications.