Career exploration toolkit

Why should you spend time exploring career paths? For most people, work life will take up a minimum of 50% of their waking hours. People spend more time on the job than they do at home. Being happy and interested in your work is not necessarily a nice-to-have. In fact, your long term career growth hinges on your ability to perform well, which you do when you are in positions that suit you.  The following activities can assist you with researching and clarifying career decisions.

Your values and interests can help you identify the work environments and jobs that suit you best. What will make you happy, motivated, or productive? Every person has their own unique set of values. For example, a person who values family time highly may seek employers with a commitment to work-life balance. A person who puts a high value on financial success will be happier in industries that pay well. A person who values social justice may thrive best in a mission-driven workplace. The more aligned your values are with the work you do, the easier it is to stay motivated, engaged, and productive. Good alignment between your career and your values is also attractive to employers because this alignment makes it more likely that you’ll be effective in your work and more committed to your job. 

To clarify your values and motivations, follow these steps. 

1. Looking at the following list of values, choose five that best align with you. 

Values List
Achievement
Advancement
Adventure
Authenticity
Authority
Autonomy
Balance
Beauty
Challenge
Change
Charity
Commitment
Compassion
Competition
Contribution
Cooperation
Connection
Courage
Creativity
Dependability		 Diversity
Enjoyment
Equality
Environment
Faith
Family
Flexibility
Fun
Growth
Health
Humor
Independence
Individuality
Influence
Initiative
Innovation
Integrity
Justice
Knowledge
Leadership		 Loyalty
Openness
Money
Prestige
Power
Privacy
Purpose
Quality
Recognition
Relationship
Reliability
Respect
Responsibility
Security
Service
Stability
Status
Teamwork
Trust
Variety

2. Determine your professional mission. Answer the question, what impact do you want to have on the world?

3. Finish this sentence, “I feel most fulfilled when ….”

With this information in hand, you can gauge how careers of interest that you are researching might match up to your values, missions, and motivations.

What’s the difference between knowledge, skills, abilities (KSAs) and why do they matter?

  • Knowledge refers to your understanding of a subject acquired through experience or learning. As you look at career paths, each one will have a focus on a specific subject matter that you will need to know in order to perform in that work. For example, a game designer may know programming language or have expertise in current gaming platforms. 
  • Skills refers to specific proficiencies that make it possible for a person to do their work. For a game designer, coding or illustration would be skills suitable to that career. 
  • Abilities refer to qualities a person has that enable success. In the game designer example, problem-solving and team collaboration may be valuable to a person in that role. 

In reality, there’s no need to distinguish too much between these, however doing so in the stage of career exploration will help you identify what you have and what you need. If you lack any required KSAs for a certain career, you’ll know what training or experience you may need in order to pursue that work. When you do start to look for work in a chosen field, then being able to thoroughly talk about your KSAs will be critical to your success in the job search. 

Brainstorm a list of your current knowledge, skills, and abilities. If you are unsure of what to write, you can either:

  1. Find a job description that interests you and highlight KSAs that it mentions that you have.
  2. Find someone who knows you and have them help you with this exercise.

No matter if you are 100% clear on your career goal, or still researching some options, getting to know the leaders and key issues in your fields of interest will help you assess what you need to know and how well a field suits you. 
Here are avenues of research you can pursue:

Organizations or companies

What are the top organizations in your field? Find them by:

  • Online searches: for example, top 10 companies in [name of your degree or field]. 
  • Companies identified as similar or competitors to the best-known companies
  • Companies identified as having the most followers on social media 
  • Companies followed on social media by prominent people in your field 

People 

Who are the most influential leaders or thinkers in your field? Find them by:

  • Online searches: for example, top 10 influencers/leaders in [name of your degree or field]. 
  • People followed on social media platforms by influential people in your field. 
  • Blog posts or white papers by top organizations in your field. 

Issues and trends

What are the leading issues and trends in your field? Find them by:

  • Discussions in professional publications, sites and conferences 
  • News coverage of top companies and people in the field
  • Blog posts or white papers by top organizations in the field.

As a next step, you identify at least one item from your lists – a company or organization, a leader or influencer, or a trend or issue – to monitor by spending at least 10 minutes daily checking for any new information or discussions.

A career map provides a visualization of the path toward a larger career goal. 

Step 1

Identify a longer term, overarching goal answering the question, “Where do I want to be with my career in 3-5 years?

Step 2

Determine what your next career move might need to be that will put you on the path toward your long term goal. 

Step 3

Figure out approximately 5 subgoals that will help you obtain the career move you identified in step 2.

Check here for more information on career mapping.