Career Goddess

Where Is Your Career Going?

When was the last time you did a diagnostic check-up on the health of your career? Since today (Nov. 17) is National Career Development Day (it only comes once a year!), why not start being proactive about managing your own career development?

America’s CareerInfoNet provides wide-ranging information about exploring careers, even new ones like green careers, as well as industries, such as the fastest-growing industries.

In addition, you can use their online assessments to find other job possibilities and potential new career fields based on your skills and your work experience. Here are three that are particularly useful:

Employability Check-up
This tool helps you determine the likelihood of your finding employment with a specific occupation at a specific wage and location. You select specific information, including an occupation and industry, a state and locality, an education level, and a wage level. When you enter all the information requested, the system generates an Employability Profile. You can repeat this process to find your best prospects as you change certain parameters, such as industry, state or locality.

Skills Profiler
Using an integrated, step-by-step process, this survey enables you to create a list of your skills and then matches them to job types that require those skills. You can use the resulting Skills Profile to identify careers that use your current skills or to determine training and/or experience gaps you would need to fill to be considered a qualified candidate in another field.

My Skills, My Future
Probably the easiest to use, this tool finds job titles that match current or previous job titles you have held. The premise is that the skills you used in past jobs are similar to skills required in jobs with other job titles. Having multiple job titles allows you to expand your job-postings search on aggregator sites like Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. This can potentially lead to more search results.

Think about how to develop your career in ways you want it to grow, rather than taking a default position of “whatever”. For example, you may want a career that uses more of your motivated skills (the skills you do well and enjoy doing) or that is more aligned with your interests and passions. Even in a bad economy and a tough job market, jobs that could really be a best-fit match for you do exist and someone needs to fill them. Why couldn’t that someone be you?

Career Assessments De-Mystified

Career assessments are a hot-hot topic for job search and career development; in fact, a Google search of the term "career assessments" yields close to 60,000 hits! But, are all career assessments equally good? And are they really the "magic bullet" that assessment vendors would have us believe?

Plan on attending the webinar "Career Assessments and the 360Reach" on Wednesday, June 18 at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) to:

• learn the top 7 reasons to use career assessments
• understand the different types of available assessments
• identify 7 career assessments to use
• learn about the 360Reach tool that gives you external feedback
• and much more.

Presented by the Career Assessment Goddess (that's me Susan Guarneri!), this webinar is designed for both individuals, as well as career coaches, to introduce career assessment best practices and potential pitfalls to avoid. Explore some career assessment websites that are accessible online and, in several cases, without any charge.

If you have ever wondered how career assessments could help you, or perhaps had poor experiences with career tests in the past, this webinar could be your "light bulb moment" to understanding the real value and cautions involved.

You will also learn about the popular 360Reach personal branding assessment AND receive a complimentary password for this external feedback tool that gives you insight into what makes you unique. Personal branding really can have a significant impact on your career and job search - don't you owe yourself the chance to find out? Bernadette and I are both Certified Personal Branding Strategists and can assist you with unearthing your brand!

Sponsored by Visibility Branding and my good friend and colleague Bernadette Martin in Paris, France, your first webinar is complimentary. All you need is a telephone and to be online. Register by emailing Bernadette Martin to receive call-in and logon information.

Lost in Career-Land? Assessments Can Help.

Career confusion and indecision, often resulting in career apathy, seem to be common for many people. Yet finding a career direction or focus is remarkably simple...it's really all about YOU.

What makes you unique - what's your "brand"? What are your motivated skills, interests and passions, values and goals, non-negotiable needs, and personality type? All of these are components in exploring what YOU are about and how that can "sync up" with some pretty exciting career choices.

Career assessments are one tool to assist in uncovering these clues about ourselves. They can be formal assessments (such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or Strong Interest Inventory), informal (such as subjective self-reports and homework questions, or creative writing, journaling or art), and even 360-degree assessments (such as the REACH 360 feedback instrument) that allow us to glimpse how others "see" us.

William Arruda, Personal Branding Guru and pioneer of 360Reach (the leading personal branding assessment), says, "Personal branding is a revolution in the way we manage our careers or businesses. It means identifying and communicating what makes you unique, relevant and compelling so that you can reach your goals."

Yes, this is all work - knowing what makes you unique and establishing your brand identity is the first step in leveraging YOU into the career of your dreams. Isn't that worth breaking a sweat for?