The established relationship between one's successful career choices and career interests drives increased adoption of interest assessment tools in career guidance. The use of technology can significantly improve this process. While there are existing international career assessment tools, there needs to be more tools tailored to Pakistani students. More research is needed on how effective digital career assessment tools are, primarily within the Pakistani context. Therefore, this research centers on developing a digital career interest assessment tool for Pakistan's secondary school students. The study included two phases: developing the career interest assessment tool based on John Holland's theory of Occupational Interest, DOTS Framework and Cognitive Information Processing in Career Services (CIP), and developing the web portal. The study adopted the Design and Development Research - Type 1 method. A purposive sampling technique was employed where the sample consisted of 230 Pakistani secondary school students from nine cities of Pakistan. Quantitative data were analyzed using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using SPSS 23. Before extracting the factors, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett's test of sphericity were used to assess the factorability of the data. The obtained data revealed five extracted factors with 35 measurable items. The highest factor, 0.759, was found on item 61, whereas the factor of 0.427 was found on item 62. The internal consistency was confirmed by calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The results revealed that in tool development, factor analysis plays a decisive role in extracting valuable factors from a dataset and filtering out irrelevant items, making the process more efficient. Moreover, results also provide insights that digital career assessments tailored for students have the potential to empower them to delve into prospects and make well-informed career decisions.

Keywords: e-career assessment, factor analysis, career guidance, secondary school students, Pakistan, technology integration