Kanso FAQ

Kanso is a career trade-off profiling tool that shows you what you'd actually protect and sacrifice in a professional role - not what you think you should want.

Kanso asks you to rate workplace conditions across Cultural, Professional, Personal, and Financial areas, one question at a time. The result is a Trade-off Profile that shows what is shaping your career decisions and where the tensions sit.

Kanso is built for:

• Individual contributors who feel something is off in their current role but can't quite name it
• Job seekers and career changers who want to evaluate opportunities against what they actually need - not just salary and title
• Anyone who has made a sensible career decision that still didn't quite add up

You don't need to be unhappy at work to benefit. Kanso is equally useful if you're thriving and want to understand why, or if you're weighing a new offer and need a clear framework to evaluate it honestly.

Kanso is not a personality test. It does not assign you a type, a colour, a four-letter code, or an archetype.

Most personality tools tell you what kind of person you are. Kanso tells you what trade-offs you're actually making - and whether those trade-offs are ones you've consciously chosen or ones that quietly happened to you.

The key difference is the focus on trade-offs. Your individual ratings create a clearer picture of the conditions shaping your decisions, rather than a personality label or generic list of preferences.

Kanso is one of several tools that help people understand their work preferences, but it answers a different question from most.

Personality, behavioural, and talent assessments such as MBTI, DiSC, and CliftonStrengths describe different patterns in how you think, behave, or contribute. Job satisfaction and burnout tools measure how you feel right now. Kanso shows what you would protect, what you would trade, and where a role may be costing you more than it should.

For a detailed comparison of Kanso against the most common alternatives, see our compare assessments page. If you've taken MBTI specifically, read the dedicated MBTI vs Kanso comparison. If you already have a strengths result and need to evaluate a particular role, read the CliftonStrengths comparison.

The assessment takes approximately five minutes and has three stages:

1. Reflect & Rate - Rate workplace conditions across Cultural, Professional, Personal, and Financial areas, one question at a time. You can move back and forward to review or change an answer. Each Highly Important or Truly Essential answer uses an available credit. You can submit only after using between five and eight credits.
2. Reveal - Receive your free Trade-off Profile, including your key drivers, Priority Map, blind spots, and Deep Dive explanations.
3. Ask - Use your three included Kanso Coach messages to explore what the profile could mean for your current role or next move. Playbook adds 50 messages and guided prompts.

You rate each workplace condition independently on the provided scale. Marking a condition Highly Important or Truly Essential uses an available credit. If you have used fewer than five or more than eight credits, you revise an answer before submitting. Kanso uses the completed ratings to show which conditions are most likely to shape what you would protect, compromise on, or investigate before accepting a role.

A trade-off profile is the personalised output you receive after completing the Kanso assessment. It includes:

Your free Trade-off Profile includes:

• Key Drivers: the priorities shaping your decisions and the tensions between them
• Priority Map: a view of how each workplace condition sits in your hierarchy
• Blind Spots: conditions your profile may not be accounting for
• Deep Dive explanations: what each high-priority condition means in practice

Sections marked Playbook turn that diagnosis into action, with decision consequences, practical steps, interview and manager questions, countermeasures, and screening criteria.

Kanso Coach is an AI-powered conversation tool grounded in your Trade-off Profile, not generic career advice. Your free diagnosis includes three messages. Playbook includes 50 messages and guided prompts from your results.

You can use Kanso Coach to:

• Understand why a particular driver matters so much to you
• Explore what to do about a friction point in your current role
• Evaluate whether a role you are considering is actually a fit for your hierarchy
• Prepare for a conversation with your manager about what you need
• Work through a career decision you are finding hard to make

Kanso Coach is not a chatbot with scripted responses. It uses a large language model (LLM) to reason about your specific profile and respond to your actual situation.

Yes. Kanso does not sell your data or share it with third parties. Your assessment results are used solely to generate your trade-off profile and power your Kanso Coach conversations.

Full details are available in the Privacy Policy.

Yes. The assessment and your Trade-off Profile diagnosis are free, with no credit card required.

Playbook is an optional one-time purchase for the action sections of your results and extended Kanso Coach access.

The assessment takes approximately five minutes. You rate each workplace condition on the provided importance scale before receiving your results.

Your free diagnosis includes your Trade-off Profile, Key Drivers, Priority Map, Blind Spots, Deep Dive explanations, and three Kanso Coach messages.

Playbook unlocks the action sections throughout your results, including practical steps, interview and manager questions, countermeasures, screening criteria, PDF export, and 50 Kanso Coach messages.

Yes. Kanso is not only for people who are unhappy or actively looking to leave.

If you are happy in your current role, Kanso can help you understand why - which factors are being met, and what your employer is getting right. That kind of clarity is useful for evaluating future opportunities, negotiating for what you need, or simply understanding what to protect.

Yes. Kanso is particularly useful when you are evaluating new roles, because your trade-off profile gives you a clear framework to assess any opportunity against.

Rather than reacting to each role on its own terms - salary here, culture there - you can measure it against your actual hierarchy. That makes it easier to spot roles that look good on paper but are likely to leave you in the same position you started.

If you're stuck between two offers, our guide on how to decide between two job offers walks through the framework.

No. Kanso is a self-assessment tool and AI coaching interface, not a replacement for a qualified human career coach.

What it does offer is structured self-reflection and an AI interface that can help you explore your results in depth. For many people, that is a useful starting point - or a way to get more out of a coaching relationship by arriving with greater clarity about their own priorities.

Kanso was built by Steve Tapley, a product leader and software engineer based in Perth, Western Australia. Steve has spent 30 years building software, with the last decade working at the intersection of technology and people strategy in the SME space.

The tool came out of a problem Steve kept seeing: smart, capable professionals who knew something was off in their career but could not name it precisely enough to act on it. Kanso is the tool he kept wishing existed.

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn →