Reference
The sixteen steps a BG5 career analysis is broken into, what the first six actually cover, and where the published teaching runs out. Written by a practitioner rather than printed on an order form.
Search the phrase and you get order buttons. The Success Codes are the structure underneath every BG5 report and consultation — sixteen steps a career design gets broken into, in order — and almost nobody explains what the steps are. This page does.
The split that matters is between the first six and the rest. Codes one through six are what a career overview delivers, and Dr. Archers calls them the bread and butter: the block a consultant should be able to do in their sleep. Codes seven through sixteen are the depth work, and they are explicitly not part of an overview — putting them in one brings on too much information to be useful.
The first six are readable from a free chart. They are sold as a report because reading them takes practice, not because the data is hidden from you.
Codes 1–6
Everything here is visible in a free chart. What a reading adds is the reading.
Which of the five career types you are — Classic Builder, Express Builder, Initiator, Advisor or Evaluator. Everything downstream is conditioned by this, because it decides how work is supposed to arrive at you in the first place.
Off track: Doing the job the way a different type would do it, and concluding you are bad at your own career.
How you are built to meet other people at work: how you enter a room, open a conversation, and take up space in a group.
Off track: Feeling awkward, rejected or misunderstood in rooms you are objectively qualified to be in.
How a sound decision actually resolves for you, and — just as usefully — the specific way you are most likely to make a bad one.
Off track: Deciding the way you were taught to rather than the way your body settles, then living with the results.
The signposts that tell you whether you are on track or off it. BG5 calls them key indicators rather than signature and resistance, and treats them as instrumentation rather than as a mood.
Off track: Having no reliable read on whether a role is working until something breaks.
How you take information in and digest it. Not how clever you are — how the processing physically works, and at what pace.
Off track: Feeling inadequate, getting frustrated, and comparing your processing to people built to process differently.
The work setting you are built for: solo, partnership, small group or large group, and the physical environment around it.
Off track: A career that would have worked in a different room. She singles this one out as the code that most often explains an otherwise inexplicable struggle.
Codes 7–16
The part an overview leaves out. This is where a career design stops describing you and starts saying what to do about a specific job.
The specific working strengths a design carries, and what they are good for commercially. Explicitly not part of an overview.
What this design does inside an organization big enough to have departments — the OC16 question rather than the small-team one.
The predictable ways this design goes wrong under pressure, and what the distortion looks like from the outside.
How you manifest your purpose in the world — the part of a design other people meet before they meet you.
The theme the working life is organized around, and what it shares with other people carrying it.
These two sit inside the block she describes as codes 11 through 15, the sequence that gets a client’s life work clear, and code 14 comes up in the context of organizational strengths and competitiveness. This site does not have her naming them outright, so it does not name them either.
The consistent, reliable flow of energy in a design, examined in detail — the core essence rather than the big picture.
Whether you belong in a large group at all, and what your qualities do at that scale. She teaches it as the last code, and as the one where a career design gets read against the OC16 structure.
Why two of them have no name here. Codes 13 and 14 are not clearly named in the recorded teaching this site works from, so they are described by the block they belong to instead of being given labels. A complete-looking list with two invented entries would read better and be worse. The rule is on /methodology and it applies to other people's terminology exactly as it applies to ours.
Beyond one person
The Success Codes read one career design. They do not read a group, and she is direct about the limit: to help a person build a business you need to go further than the sixteen codes, which is what partnership analysis and small-business analysis are for.
That is the same boundary the free tools on this site sit on the other side of. A Penta is three to five people read as one working entity, with twelve seats that have to be carried by somebody. OC16 is the six-department form a business takes at ten to sixteen. Both are free, both run in your browser, and neither requires a report.
Frequently asked
Want the first block read for you rather than looked up? The written HD Career Design Report is $97, and the Career Design Consultation · Level 1 at $497 is the same material with a person on the other end of it.