How to Plan a Career 5: O*NET Career Exploration Tools

This continues our series on how to plan a career that enhances your satisfaction & income
In previous posts we explored the benefits of identifying your interests, vocational passions, and occupational values. We discussed John Holland’s six personality traits: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. We shared what you could find in the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
Multiple Career Exploration Tools in the O*NET Group
The following comes from www.Onetcenter.org

“The O*NET^TM team has designed a set of self-directed career exploration/assessment tools to help workers consider and plan career options, preparation, and transitions more effectively. They also are designed for use by students who are exploring the school-to-work transition. The assessment instruments, which are based on a "whole-person" concept, include:

O*NET Ability Profiler

O*NET Interest Profiler

O*NET Computerized Interest Profiler

O*NET Interest Profiler Short Form

O*NET Work Importance Locator

O*NET Work Importance Profiler”

O*NET Occupation Search Tools

From the web site www.Onetonline.org you find “O*NET OnLine has detailed descriptions of the world of work for use by job seekers, workforce development and HR professionals, students, researchers, and more!” You may

• Find Occupations: Browse groups of similar occupations to explore careers. Choose from industry, field of work, science area, and more
• Advanced Search: Focus on occupations that use a specific tool or software. Explore occupations that need your skills
• Crosswalks: Connect to a wealth of O*NET data. Enter a code or title from another classification to find the related O*NET-SOC occupation

The summary provides a lot of information: tasks performed,  tools and technology used, knowledge required, skills, abilities, work activities and context, education level required, interests, work styles and values. It also describes related occupations, wages and employment trends, and  sources of information.

The details section shows graphs illustrating the relative importance of the tasks, knowledge, skills, abilities work activity, work context, interests, work styles, and work values.

You may use the graphs to compare the data about the occupation with the information you found in your Occupational Values Test and the Motivated Skills Test.

Join me Friday to learn more about comparing what you find about yourself with occupations