Career Research
Conducting career research allows you to weigh a career against your interests, personality, values, and skills. To explore whether a career seems to be a good “fit” for you, you need to find out the main duties of that career, the type of training required to enter the field, the employment outlook for the area, the potential earnings, and other factors such as these. Even if you think you know all there is to know about a profession, do your research anyway. There may have been new developments in the field of which you weren’t aware, or there simply may be aspects of the career that you had never considered. Don’t rely on career stereotypes or misperceptions!
Ways to research careers
- RIASEC Categories
- Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH)
- The CC&C Library
- Information Interviews
- Other Methods
The dynamic nature of careers
We live in a very dynamic work world—career fields are constantly changing. Some fields shift their focus or add to their duties to reflect the changes in our society. Likewise, new job titles are often created to meet the demands of our society. Career research is not something you do only once—it is important that you stay abreast of the continuous developments in the world of work.
Don’t be discouraged if you cannot find the career for which you are looking. You may be searching under the wrong title or you may not even know what to call a set of job duties. Come by the CC&C and we can help you with your search.
On the other hand, you may run across an interesting career that the CC&C has not included on our list of resources. Please let us know if this happens, and we’ll be sure to add the job title. Other students may need that information, too!
