Determining a career direction is often not easy. Sometimes there is not just one direction that suites us and sometimes our choice is unattainable for a variety of reasons.
The following will lead you to some exercises and some links that can help you with your exploration. At some time, however, you might choose to bring the results of your self-exploration to a trained career counsellor to help you focus your decision-making or to point out what you might have overlooked.
Determining your career direction
involves three steps:
Self
Assessment to determine which interests, values, personality
traits and skills you most want to use in your career.
Occupational
Research to learn which occupations might meet your requirements.
Decision-making
to decide which options are feasible and what steps you can take to move forward
in your chosen career direction.
A variety of assessment inventories are available to help you determine your career interests and personality traits. Interpreting these inventories is best done with a qualified career counsellor. However, there are a number of sites on the internet that have useful questionaires for you to begin with.
Hollands Themes are very broad categories of interest that relate to your preferred career areas. Once you have decided on your highest themes, you can relate them to occupations through a site called Career Issues.
Information on personality type is available from the Humber College MBTI pages, including links to the Kiersey Temperament Sort , an inventory that can be done on line. The results will help you learn more about personality type, yours and others.
University of Waterloo's Career Manual is on-line. After you have worked through the various self-assessment activities you might want to save them to disk or print them out so you can discuss them with a trained counsellor.
Careers relating to Hollands Themes are listed at a site called Career Issues.
CareerQuests Top Ten Checklists is a quick way to enter your top ten personal traits and preferences and relate them to the world of work. You can then find out more about those occupations.
You can enter the key words of your occupatonal interests into the Key Word Search section of the Occupational Outlook Handbook to come up with an expanded list of occupations that match your interests.
Selecting courses that match your career interests.
Job Search
Planning a Career: A Guided Tour provides some other hints for determining your career direction.