November is National Career Development Month and November 17th is National Career Development Day, so now is the perfect time to be thinking about your career choices and exploring opportunities.
Career development is the process of choosing a career, improving your skills, and advancing along a career path. It is a lifelong process. The Balance Careers suggests four steps to assist with your career development process.
1. Self-Assessment
First, it is important to know who you are and what you are looking for in a job or career. Use these resources to help you learn more about yourself:
- Interests: the things you enjoy doing
- Skills: your abilities and strengths; can be improved with practice
- Work Values: the ideas and beliefs that are important to you and guide your actions
You will identify career interests that might be a good fit for you during the self assessment, but you will need more information before you can make a final decision.
2. Explore Options
Next, learn about the occupations that seem to be a good fit based on the results of your self assessment and any other professions that interest you. Use these online resources as a starting point, but don’t stop there. Reach out to mentors, alumni, and other professionals in your network to learn what the job is really about.
- Occupational Outlook Handbook: Browse information for hundreds of occupations, including what the workers do, work environment, salary data, and required education and qualifications.
- Emsi Labor Market Insights: See exactly who is hiring and where the jobs are for various industries and locations.
3. Match
During step three, you will decide which occupation is the best fit for you based on what you learned during steps one and two.
- Identify the occupation in which you are most interested and one or two alternatives on which to fall back if, for any reason, you can’t pursue your first choice.
- Give serious thought to how you will prepare to enter your chosen career, the costs associated with education and training, and whether you will face any barriers, which are the realities discussed during step one.
- Go back to step two if you find you need to explore your options further before making a decision.
4. Take Action
Now that you have identified a potential path, write a career action plan. It will serve as a guide to reaching your ultimate goal of getting a job in the career you deemed to be a good match during step three. Identify what long-term and short-term goals you will have to reach to get to the ultimate one.
