SELF KNOWLEDGE - EXPLORING YOUR FUTURE
The first step in making a career decision is knowing yourself. Self-knowledge is the key to selecting a career which will be satisfying and at which you will be successful. A consultation with a counselor can get you started on the road to self-understanding. Come to Counseling & Academic Advising and visit with a Career Counselor.
MY INTERESTS
Career interest assessments are tools that can help guide you toward a suitable career choice. They help you organize your patterns of interests and give you a common vocabulary with which to discuss career questions and ideas with your counselor. Discussion with your career counselor will help you understand how the results relate to possible careers.
Counselor Assisted Inventories
The counselors at Macomb have access to many inventories to help you clarify your career interests. When you consult with your counselor, you will decide together which inventories will be best for you.
Computerized career guidance programs include:
MOIS (Michigan Occupational Information System) - This system provides career information about career based upon Michigan statistics. It also has an interest-inventory component.
FOCUS II - This is a computerized guidance system designed for College students struggling with a career decision. Your counselor may decide to have you complete up to seven modules which may help you with your interests, your skill and value clarification as well as your degree of career-decision readiness.
DISCOVER - This is a computer-based guidance system that has a interest inventory component which your counselor may ask you to complete.
Your counselor may choose to use some paper and pencil interest inventories such as:
- The Strong Interest Inventory
- The Career Assessment Inventory
- The Career Decision Making System
- The Self-Directed Search
When meeting with a counselor, you and your counselor will decide which inventories are best for you. There will be a charge for some inventories in order to cover the costs of scoring.
MY VALUES
Understanding your values is a life-long process, one which you can begin now. This is a complex study, but when finished, will be very satisfying. When you can identify your work values, they will help you choose a career that will give meaning and purpose to your worklife.
Values are a reflection of what we consider to be most important in our life. They can be divided into personal values and work values. When choosing a career, we try to choose one that will be compatible with what is most important to us in our life. The more our work allows us to express our values, the more satisfied we will be with our choice.
As we have grown through life, our values have been influenced by other people (parents, relatives, friends), by our social environment (school, church and mass media) and by our own evaluation of everything we have experienced and everything we have learned. Values are not the same thing as attitudes, but your attitudes come from your values. Values are not behaviors that can be seen, but are the internal principles from which behavior arises.
Our goal in career planning is to concentrate on work values, recognizing that your work values will spring from and compliment your personal values.
You can clarify your value system by taking value assessment inventories. They will help you clarify and prioritize your values. Some may require the guidance of a counselor, while others may be self administered. Instead of relying on the results of just one assessment, try several of the assessments listed below and look for patterns in your results.
MY SKILLS
Knowing your current skills and your aptitudes is essential for a successful career decision.
What is a skill? What is an ability? What is an aptitude?
Abilities refer to those qualities which allow you to act with competence. They are part of you and how you interact with the world. It may be something as basic as the ability to draw or to understand math easily, or it may be something less obvious such as the ability to stay calm in a crisis. On the other hand, a skill may be defined as a developed aptitude or ability. They are competencies which can be developed through training, life experiences, hobbies or previous work experience. Whereas an aptitude may be defined as your capacity to readily learn a skill.
Some interesting facts about skills:
- Over 1,500 skills can be identified
- Most people have 200 to 300 skills but usually can identify only 3 or 4.
- Skills are often categorized into 3 areas:
UNDERSTANDING MY SKILLS
Self-Management Skills
- These are skills that describe your personality.
- They tell the employer how well you will relate to others and will fit into the work environment.
- Dependable, reliable, hard-working are commonly stated as self-management skills. Other skills in this category can include being mature, confident, friendly, an enthusiastic team player, flexible, honest, etc.
Job Content Skills
- These skills indicate your knowledge of the career field that you are pursuing.
- These are the skills stated in a job description; they are the special skills you will need to do the job.
- Job content skills may include work processing, typing, computer programming, designing, desktop publishing, singing, acting, testing, etc.
Transferable Skills
- These are skills which can be used in a variety of work settings.
- These skills are acquired in many different ways: on the job, hobbies, volunteer work, education, life experiences
- Often these are skills you have used successfully during activities that you have enjoyed.
- Transferable skills may include: problem solving, listening, communicating, writing, researching, planning, measuring.
Your career success will depend upon how you develop these three skill categories. As a college student, you already have many valuable transferable and self-management skills. Your college experiences will help you enhance the ones you have and develop those you don't--but believe you should. Your major course of study will help you develop more and more job content skills.
As a step to understanding yourself, evaluate your current skills. Working with a career counselor will help you identify the skills you currently have and those you would like to develop.
MY PERSONALITY
A particularly interesting area of self-knowledge is personality or temperament. Your personality is the result of all of your unique individual qualities. Your interests, skills, values, attitudes, activities all come together to create YOU. You are unique, and this uniqueness among individuals is something fascinating to study.
Personality is another variable in your career decision making process. However, personality type need not limit your career choices. People with very different personalities may be drawn to the same career and people with similar personality types may find themselves leaning in completely opposite ways.
So, personality is another piece of the puzzle of knowing the answer to the question, "Who Am I?" It is an important piece to consider when making your final career choice.
Personality or type assessments are tools that can help you bring your personality characteristics or type into focus.