Assess Yourself for Success

In my first blog post, I told you how you could prepare for the question:  What are you going to do after you graduate from college?

For those of you that weren't sure, you had to ask yourself a lot of questions.  Some of those questions may remain unanswered.  It's not necessarily because you haven't given it much thought.  In fact, you may have given it a lot of thought.  The truth is that there isn't a clear-cut answer for many people, and that is okay if you're one of them.

If you're still lost in the career exploration process, you could benefit from taking an assessment tool to see which professions are potential matches for you.  If you visit your university's career center (or a career center open to the public if you're not currently in school), you could consult with a career counselor to see which ones are recommended for you.

There are a variety of career assessment tools.  Rather than bombard you with a list of them, I can recommend that you get started with one:  My Next Move.

This is great because it is an online tool that is accessible to anyone.

On top of that, it speaks to people at different stages in the career exploration process.

1. You might already know what job you want.  If you know you want to be an accountant, the assessment has a section where you can type in "accountant," and it will give you a list of the top 20 careers related to accountants.  For each career, My Next Move will summarize the following requirements and expectations:  Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Personality, Technology, Education, and Job Outlook.  If you would like to do more exploration into an occupation (and you probably do), My Next Move provides resources for further reading.
2. You might not know what job you want, but you might know what industry you want to be in.  In that case, My Next Move has a section where could explore a specific field.  For instance, you can choose "education."  Then it will provide a variety of occupations that fall within that field.  Again, the requirements and expectations for each career will be outlined.
3. If you do not know where to begin, then My Next Move will direct you to the O*NET Interest Profiler.  After you complete the profiler, your results will provide you with a breakdown of your skills as well as a list of careers that match them.  The list conveniently shows the preparation level required for each career.  The results could be a bit extensive so don't hesitate to ask a career counselor for assistance in understanding them.

So there you go.  There's nothing left to do but to do it.  Regardless of where you are in exploring careers, take a few minutes now to visit My Next Move.