Career Exploration
One student's journey through the process of discovering a career.
For anyone who is interested, here is a link to my Final Project for EDUC 131, the Career Exploration class for which I am writing this blog. It basically follows my Pinterest boards for the account and how they have grown and changed over the semester as I learned new things about career exploration. There is no audio, so it might not make a lot of sense, but I basically showed some pins that exemplify my thought process for each board at certain points throughout the semester, progressing from left to right. Just click the photo below to get started! Yours, Tricia Bacon
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After spending a few weeks exploring international trade compliance as a career, I am traveling back to the Focus 2 assessments to reflect a little bit more on one of the sections I have not mentioned yet: the values assessment. The values I have listed from this assessment are creativity, helping others, and tangible results. Both creativity and helping others are values reflected in my work interest assessment, as I would like a job that will make me think and force me to challenge myself while allowing me to make a difference in someone else’s life. As for the tangible results, I get frustrated and stressed when I cannot see that progress is being made, making me less productive and willing to get things done, so seeing these results would be important to the health of my career. Of these three values, helping others is the most important to me since that is what I believe contributes to one’s purpose in life. While I would like to see these results in action and know that what I am doing is making a difference, tangible results is probably the least important value to me because I will get the job done, regardless of whether or not I can see the outcome of it.
Another aspect of Focus 2 I have not discussed much is its ability to compare the results from all five assessments and see what the common careers are between them all. This process produced a strange assortment of results for me; I have no matches between all five assessments or even four of them, but I have plenty between just two or three. The jobs that appear when matching my values with something else are usually jobs involving engineering of some kind, which makes sense since those jobs both involve a great deal of creativity and produce tangible results. Some other results that showed up were some of the more artistic jobs that I have looked at before, but mostly as dream jobs that I will not likely pursue, like animators and video game designers. However, none of these jobs really seem to take into account the value I find most important. While a few psychology careers popped up, most of my results ignored my interest in helping others, which makes it hard for me to look into any of them very seriously. All of these assessments are important factors in my career exploration process, but it is nearly impossible for me to satisfy all of those results. After all, the largest number of assessments that matched up in a career search was three out of five. Of those five assessments, I believe that personality is probably the most important when deciding a career. I will not click well in a work environment with which my personality clashes, nor will I enjoy that job very much. While values are crucial to me when determining a job, the way Focus 2 lays them out makes them less important to me; you literally just pick your top three values from a short list rather than taking a quiz that will provide you with more accurate/less biased results than those you decide yourself. Also, I believe that my personality reflects my values, which makes the values category kind of useless to me. In fact, I can see my personality in all of my assessments, or at least a common thread between them all. So while all of these facets of Focus 2 are important to my career exploration, the ability of me as a person to be compatible with my work environment seems to trump them all. Now that I’ve talked about trade compliance for a few weeks, I need to look into the work environment a little bit more. One of the biggest issues in creating a positive work environment is cultural competency, or recognizing the diversity within the workplace and making sure everyone is included in the work environment. This can mean keeping racism and sexism out of the office, making sure those with a disability are still able to work, or even recognizing mental illness within the workplace and how to help those suffering from it. If you follow me on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/triciacbacon/), you can see that most of my pins on my cultural competency board focus on international etiquette. While I do pin about various other forms of diversity, global cultural differences is what I think about when I hear the words “cultural competency,” and it is the most relevant to the fields I have been looking into so far. Other cultures have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. When I was younger and my dad would go abroad on business trips, he would occasionally bring souvenirs back from China, Germany, Turkey, and many other places he visited. As I grew older, I started taking Spanish classes and learning about Latin American cultures and I became friends with people from many different countries and backgrounds, whether they were American citizens or foreign exchange students. Seeing that there are people who do things differently from America piques my interest, and it is the reason why I started looking at trade compliance in the first place. In the literal definition of the word, becoming more knowledgeable about other cultures has become very important to me, both as an interest and from an ethical standpoint. When it comes to the job itself, cultural competency is obviously very important in international trade compliance – after all, international is in the name! The work environment is saturated with influences from other cultures, and people from a variety of countries come in contact with each other all the time to trade. Intolerance for the everyday experiences, languages, and customs of these other countries would lead to a loss in business and probably a loss in your job as well. Cultural competence would also create a more positive work environment, as constantly belittling others in the office with incorrect or bigoted views of other cultures will not keep office morale very high. But this does not mean that becoming more aware of different customs is a chore that must be done for the job’s sake; it can be a fascinating learning experience (at least in my opinion), and listening to others speak of their experiences and lifestyles can help build relationships with fellow employees, expanding professional networks. As the celebration of diversity is becoming more and more prevalent in our society, keeping up with this trend is basically mandatory. Whether or not you choose to see it as just that or as an exciting chance to meet new people and learn new things is up to you. Resumes can be a very simple or very difficult part of the job search process. All you have to do is clearly and concisely describe your abilities and experiences to potential employers. However, with each resume you submit, you must tailor those skills so they are relevant to the company to which you are applying. As someone who does not have a clear plan for my future quite yet, finding enough specific, relevant skills for any specific job is not really possible, so I must make what skills I do possess relevant. For some jobs, this is easy; for others, not so much. Keeping with the theme of last week’s post, I decided to tailor my resume to a business internship at AbbVie Inc., a biopharmaceutical company that markets their treatments around the world to help as many people as possible. This job tied in with my work interest as a helper and my interest in trade compliance, so it seemed like a great place to start, but the tailoring process was not as simple as it seemed.
As far as relevant experience goes, I have volunteered multiple times, shadowed at a pediatric clinic, and took a job as a nanny in the past. All of these experiences can be tailored for communication and possibly leadership skills. While homeowners, patients, and families I have worked for are the obvious beneficiaries of my contributions, I have also gained valuable experiences, such as improving those skills and forming new relationships with a variety of people. However, these experiences would be better on my resume if I were applying for a position in which I worked with children. That kind of career is what I was thinking I might want to do at first, but since I am now leaning away from that possibility, these experiences are not quite as relevant as they once were. And since I am just now discovering new ideas of what I may want to do in the future and have no definite career plans yet, it is difficult to find or start obtaining new experiences specific to a certain career. My top skills are probably problem solving and analyzing situations, and while they are listed as key skills in the job description, positions like the one I “applied” for tend to emphasize communication skills more than anything else. I have developed my communication skills over the past few years, but they can always use improving. On the flip side, I do not have as much experience with leadership positions because I am very introverted, and leading is not within my comfort zone. Since most companies are interested in those kinds of skills above all others, though, I have been trying to work on those skills more. The other skills listed on the resume are oral and written skills, and while these are not my favorite things to work on, I have built them up for certain classes and can use them fairly well. Through the process of writing a resume, I have learned that while I do have some of the skills required by employers, I need to hone in on much more specific ones for a specific job I am looking for. While I may not know what that job is now, there are universally desired skills like leadership that I can be working on until I find the job match that is right for me. |
AuthorHello! I'm Tricia Bacon, a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill and a current explorer of potential careers. Archives
November 2016
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