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Thinking about your Career
Many professional career planner suggest that rather than thinking about "getting a job," people ought to think about "finding a career." A "career" implies a lifelong pursuit or passion, whereas a "job" implies work divorced from personal investment. Whatever you want to call your professional ambition, it is probably important to you that you find work that supports you both financially and emotionally.
Begin to identify your interests with career quizzes:
The Choices Planner: The Choices Planner offers extensive career and college search services. Using this tool, you may search for careers based on the criteria of your choosing, you may take surveys that assess your work values and skills, and you may find careers that match your interests. This is a great place to get some ideas about different career options that may be of interest to you. Log in using Site ID: 1211538 and Password: U3f6e5G6. Once you create your own portfolio, you can save your work and sign in with your own User Name and Password. The "Interest Profiler" is a great place to start exploring different careers.
Several tools to help you think about career options:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics: The BLS Handbook is the gold standard for thinking about careers--this website includes everything from information about particular career tracks to occupational outlook information. A great place to learn more about careers.
CareerOneStop: CareerOneStop offers resources ranging from a career search engine to advice on resume-building and job interviews.
Choosing a career: About.com's career planning page. It also could be worthwhile (or at least fun) to check out About.com's Career Quizzes (remember to take the conclusions of these quizzes with a grain of salt--use them instead as a way to learn more about different options).
Future-Jobs-O-Matic: This is a new resource added to National Public Radio's Marketplace website. Find jobs that are growing, those that are shrinking, the highest paid, and the lowest paid. You can search careers by broad fields or by more specific professions.
Financial considerations:
Salary.com: In addition to depicting the salaries that different career paths potentially offer, salary.com has a wide variety of career search tools, indexes, and calculators.
Payscale.com: Payscale.com offers information about salaries and compensation.
Long-term planning:
Maybe you know something about the type of work you want to do--still, there are lots of things to think about. Where do you want to live? What sort of opportunities will you have to do the work that you want to do at that location?
Happiness: a Time Magazine article with the results of a happiness survey given to professionals in 2007. Though this might not apply to you, it certainly makes for an interesting read.
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