Career Planning
Please bring along the print-outs of the below profiles when you are coming for Careers Appointment
Self-Exploration
The first step in planning a career is to take a long, hard look at yourself. Happy people are often successful people. We have all met the “square peg in the round hole” type and seen for ourselves how stressed these people usually are. The key to being successful in a career is to know yourself very well and then to find a job that suits your strengths and, hopefully, get well paid for it! You need a good understanding of your personality, your values, your aptitudes and your interests to really understand yourself. Below are some sites that will help you in exploring these issues. They are only aids, you are the only authority on yourself but they can be very helpful. Try to be as honest as possible in answering the questions. The outcome will only be as accurate as your answers are. There is no right/wrong answer to any question, only that which most accurately reflects yourself.
Occupational Interest Inventories
http://www.careersworld.com - go into “Personal Preference Exercise” and follow steps from there. It will ask initially for a username and password. Just create your own.
http://www.careerdirections.ie - go into “Matching” exercise
Personality Profiles
The site below contains a number of Personality Exploration Tools that might help you to reach a greater understanding of your personality, which in turn will help with an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses. The Myers Briggs is particularly useful in that it gives a very good profile on each type and what work best suits them. Please bring a print-out of the completed profiles.
The following are other personality instruments you might find useful:
Values Questionnaires
It is important that we know what motivates us. For some, altruism may be important, for others it may be security or status. These are what drive our ambitions, interests and motivate us. Some people need to be in a job that meets all their values. Others may be content with meeting some of their values outside of the work environment. The following may help you to clarify your values:
http://www.careerperfect.com/CareerPerfect/cpWorkPrefInv.htm
http://www.mrs.umn.edu/services/career/career_planning/workvalues2.php
Skills Assessment
Explore your skills strengths and weaknesses. What am I innately good at? What skills have I learnt to be good at? What skills do I most enjoy using? What skills do I need to develop?
http://www.d.umn.edu/student/loon/car/self/career_transfer_survey.html
http://www.yorkregion-vcrc.com/transferable_skills.htm
What skills do employers value? See below:
http://www.asvabprogram.com/downloads/ASVAB_Idea_Skills.pdf
http://www.placementmanual.com/career/career-11.html
http://www.uwrf.edu/ccs/skills.htm
Aptitude Tests
These are used to test your reasoning over a number of areas, such as, verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, logical etc. See sites below:
http://www.morrisby.com/test_takers_guide/sampletests.asp
List of aptitude test websites
Explore Types of Jobs
When you know yourself very well you need to become equally well versed on the demands of different occupations. Many of us have a very poor understanding of what a job entails. The sites below will give you a very good undertanding of what is involved in the different roles
http://www.prospects.ac.uk/cms/ShowPage/Home_page/Explore_types_of_jobs/p!elmjX
http://www.careerdirections.ie - go into data-base
