Choosing the Right Career For You

Our Interest Profiler can help you decide the best occupation for you

The ecosystem of work revolves around something called Skills Identification. In other words, liking what you do is as important as doing what you like! Understanding the importance of utilizing your current identifiable skills to look for a career that will provide a positive and long term effect on your overall job satisfaction.

These three factors will guide you when choosing your career path.

Career Decision Making

The U.S. Department of Labor has a great tool that generates occupational recommendations by measuring your level of engagement with work activities linked to six primary interest areas. This tool is called an Interest Profiler; it can be accessed under the Explore Careers tab. The Interest Profiler measures six types of occupational interests: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional. What area of interest will you fit into?

Building Self Esteem

We need to better understand ourselves before taking on different challenges. It is best to start with our current skills, but where do our skills come from? They come from many places that you probably wouldn’t normally expect. Many of them come from places like paid work experience, volunteer experience, educational experience, military experience, and even general life experiences. The problem is job seekers don't know what their skills are and/or don’t have the words to describe them. A good idea is to work on these skills to prepare for the road ahead.

Upward Mobility

Whether you are comfortable in your current role, or looking for a more challenging opportunity, it is a good idea to keep learning and improving on existing skills. You can earn industry recognized certifications and licenses that some employers even pay for, which will allow for growth within your career and industry. Some examples of this include earning certifications in things like; Microsoft Office, Adobe, QuickBooks, Autodesk, Project Management, Security, and more that may take 3-4 weeks to 3-4 hours.

If you follow the steps mentioned above, you should have a great foundation for seeking a career that will last for many years to come. Be persistent and engaging, but most of all have fun with it!

Written by: Steven Heinitz, Career Consultant, TANF