Success Through Confidence Series Part 19: Exploring Your Options

Career exploration is the second stage of the career planning process. You will begin to explore careers after completing the first stage of the career planning process, self assessment. During that stage you took inventory of your values, interests, personality and skills. You should have come away from the self assessment stage with a list of careers that are appropriate for you based on what you found out about yourself.

Now it's time to learn about the careers on your list so you can begin to make that list shorter. Your goal is to eventually narrow it down to the one career you want to pursue. Try not to eliminate any career from your list until you do, at least, a little bit of research about it. Even if you think you know about an occupation, you may be surprised by what you learn.

Start With the Basics

At first you will just want to gather some basic information about each career on your list. Let's assume you have a list of ten occupations. You can do some preliminary research which will allow you to narrow down your list before you do more in depth research. When exploring careers you will need basic information such as job descriptions, employment statistics, job outlook, earnings and educational and training requirements.