Identifying the careers you are interested in

One of the best websites to reference is:  www.quintcareers.com. Check it out before you go further.

The first order of business in determining your career path is getting your resources together to see what you have and what you are interested in and what your perimeters are. What education do you have/need? Experience? Related experience? Transferable skills?

What are your interests and abilities? To examine these interests and abilities, I suggest you write a ‘who I am presentation’. This will allow you to think about your life in general. What did you like growing up? What experiences did you have which contribute to now. Chores you liked or disliked?  What did you like and dislike on previous jobs? Why? How does all this relate?

If you do not care to do this presentation for yourself, about yourself, you may want to take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle to divide the page. At the top of the page put likes on one side and dislikes on the other. Do not forget to answer the question for yourself of why you like or dislike the different things about your work.  You may want to look at your early life for things you liked/disliked then. What about hobbies, then and now?

What are your boundaries/restrictions? Do you have a family to consider? Can you relocate? Travel? Salary considerations will come later as you relate these interests/abilities to careers and the requirements thereof.

There are other ways to look at your interests and abilities and one of the instruments you may enjoy using to find out these answers is: O’net center. Web address is:  www.onetcenter.org/CIP.html You can go to the site and you will find an interest profiler and a work importance profiler.

Once in the interest profiler, you will see the first few screens explain how to enter information. Then you will see a colored list of activities. Choose whether you like, dislike, or are unsure of each activity. After you have responded to all the activities, the Interest Profiler will generate a display that shows your interests for each area.

Then pick one or more of the five Job Zones, each of which indicates a different level of education, training and experience.  *The Interest Profiler then gives a list of occupations from the O’net that best match the combination of interests and level of education and training you selected. You can look further at the occupations by using a keyword on the O’net to look at what is included in the job selected to look into.

From this you may want to click on the Work Importance Profiler. As before, the first part explains how to use the instrument. In the ranking phase, click on each statement  in order to rank its importance to you. The ranking phase lists all the statements about your ideal job on one screen. Choose either Y or N to indicate whether or not that statement is important to you. This instrument helps a person determine which values are important from the six areas that are measured:  Achievement, Independence, Recognition, Relationships, Support and Working Conditions. The instruments describe the work value descriptions.

Another source to quickly identify your interest areas was created by the US Navy. You can use this instrument with no obligation to join the Navy.

You will get a profile of your interest areas of: Do-er, Problem Solver, Innovator, Advisor, Persuader, and Planner.  http://www.navy.com/careers/accelerateyourlife/lifeaccelerator displays a list of activities.  Click on the description of your highest interest area to receive an interpretation of that area and to learn about activities, work environments, and careers that relate to that interest area.

Note: If interested in government careers/jobs, you may then connect these interest areas to occupations.

These items end up being your values in action. Your decisions always come from what your values are. Although your priorities for values change over time, in general, your basic values do not. You will want to match your skills, interests and abilities to occupations.