No black box. Here is exactly what the questions do, where the numbers come from, and what this tool can and can't tell you.
The Trade Finder is a guided exploration tool. It takes someone who has no idea where to start and gives them three skilled trades worth reading about.
It is not a validated psychological instrument, an aptitude test, or a prediction about how your career will go. It is a structured way to narrow the field down to three, so you have somewhere to point your attention. Everything below explains how it does that.
Two versions exist. The career-changer path runs 15 questions across work personality, background, strengths, interests, work environment, and income and timeline. The student path runs 12 questions across strengths, interests, work style, goals, and what you want your future to look like.
Every answer option is tagged with the trades it points toward — 57 tags in all across 185 answer options. Choosing “I'd rather be outdoors than in a shop” adds weight to the trades where that's true and none to the ones where it isn't.
Each trade in the set is scored by adding the weight of every tag it carries, with a direct match counting double. The three highest scores are what you see. That's the whole calculation.
Simple additive scoring is transparent and checkable. Anyone can read the questions, see which trades an answer points to, and understand why a result came out the way it did. A more sophisticated model would be harder to explain and no more honest about what it actually knows — which, in this case, is only what you told it in three minutes.
Everything here is worth knowing before you weigh the results.
Because most people arrive with no vocabulary for any of this. They know “electrician” and “plumber” and have never heard of a millwright, an elevator mechanic, or a wind technician. The Trade Finder's job is to hand you three specific words you can go research, ask about, and rule in or out. That's a real problem and it solves it.
Read all three trade pages, not just the first one. Look at the pay in your own state rather than the national number. If a trade still looks right after all that, the apprenticeship link at the bottom of every trade page will show you what's open near you.