Career Exploration
One student's journey through the process of discovering a career.
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.
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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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