Assessing Your Interests

Life is too short to be spent doing work you don’t like. While we all need to pay our bills and save for our futures, and while no job is perfect (even people doing their dream job don’t like it some days), we spend too much time working accept being miserable there. If you can get a job that’s in the top 20% of what you’re good at, top 20% of what you like, and top 20% of what you can get paid for your skills, that’s a win! Not that you shouldn’t aim higher than that going forward, but you’re at a great place to take your time while you figure out your next step. This post focuses on identifying and categorizing your interests with the CareerForce Interest Assessment. The results page describes six interest categories and how much affinity you have for each, as well as what career clusters could fit well with your interests.

-            Log into your job seeker account and complete your Interest Assessment, if one is available

o   Be sure to save your results for future reference

o   If one is not available on your state’s job seeker website, you might benefit from taking the CareerForce assessment and exploring some recommended webpages, knowing you won’t be eligible for appointments, events, or other such personal support if you’re not a Minnesota resident

-            Review each of the categories and career clusters listed to see what you may have an affinity for

-            Consider these results in comparison to the skills you identified in the previous post, as well as any initial job interests you had, for how you might find that type of job in a strongly matching interest category and an industry listed in that category

Complete your Interest Assessment

While this assessment is a little longer than the Employment Readiness Assessment, it should still be easy to complete within 15 minutes. Similar to the ERA, plan to spend more time reviewing and thinking about the results of your Interest Assessment than you’ll spend answering the assessment questions. By taking the assessment after logging into your CareerForce account, your Interest Assessment results are saved to your dashboard by clicking Submit on the final page of questions. Know that when reviewing these results on your dashboard later, clicking Cancel will not clear your results but clicking Start Over will. Make a note on your calendar to come back and review and reflect on your assessment results at least once a month during your search for a better paying job. An example of the results page is shown below, so you know what to expect after completing your assessment.

Results of a CareerForce Interest Assessment.

Review categories and career clusters

What type of person are you based on your assessment results? Does this give you any new insight into how you think and like to work? Read through the descriptions of at least your top two categories and the industries associated with them. Can you see yourself doing your next job in any of those? Keep this in the back of your mind in the coming days as you continue through the next several posts to prepare to land your next, higher paying job.

You might consider supplementing this with another personality or aptitude inventory, such as 16 Personalities or the interest assessment in the parachute book mentioned in the previous post about identifying your skills. Even when assessments like these aren’t strictly career-focused, they could still be valuable for understanding who you are and what your personal strengths and weaknesses are. Knowing this is valuable not only for enhancing your performance in your next job, but also for succeeding in the interview you’ll probably have to complete to be offered that job.

Compare your interests to your skills

Now that you’ve done some work to understand what your employment interests are, how well do those interests match the skills you have? Hopefully by considering this, you can get an idea of “what jobs can I do that I probably would both be good at and enjoy doing?”. As you identify specific jobs that align well with both your skills and interests, check the employment outlook for those jobs, and hopefully you'll find a few options that you are good at, like to do, and can get paid more money for!

Conclusion

Take stock of your interests today to learn more about what kinds of work you like to do (or at least think you would like to do). Be sure to save your assessment results to review them at least monthly until you land a better paying job. Plan on spending at least as much time reviewing and reflecting on your assessment results as you do on taking the assessment. Compare your interests to the skills you identified from the previous post to determine both what you are good at and what you enjoy doing.

Log into your job seeker account and take your interest assessment right away!

The next step on the roadmap: Assessing Your Skill Depth

Identifying Skills for a Better Paying Job

The next step to take toward finding a better paying job is to compare the skills you already have to the skills required for other jobs. Today’s CareerForce assessment is intended to help you compare skills in your current job to skills required for other jobs; jobs that are in demand, jobs that best align with your current job’s required skillset, and comparing your current job skillset to a career of interest, if you have one in mind already.

After considering this, it’s also important to consider other skills you have beyond what you use in your current job or have used in previous jobs. Any skills you possess could have potential value in paid work and identifying every skill you have could help you to find the best fitting better paying job available. You’ll want to get yourself a copy of an enduring job hunting classic, the book What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles, to guide you through this exercise. This book is commonly available to borrow for free from local libraries.

Instead of trying to jump straight into your ultimate dream job, focus on identifying a better paying job of some interest to you that you already have the skillset to pursue today, that will act as a steppingstone to help you qualify for that dream job in the future.

-            Compare your current job (or most recent one if you’re not working right now) to in-demand careers, what matches your current role, and what you might be interested in next

-            On your own paper or computer, make a list of all the skills you have, both in and outside of paid work – expect to spend a bit of time and effort on doing this well

-            Use this search for a better paying job to plan how to get to your ultimate dream job, helping you identify better paying jobs you can pursue now to help you get there

Comparing your current job to others

Visit the job seeker website for your state to perform a manual comparison to specific occupations as shown below:

Compare your experience to other in-demand jobs. Replace Procurement Clerks with the name of your current job.

Compare your experience to other jobs with closely matching skill requirements.

Compare Procurement Clerks and Purchasing Managers as an example. Click on the Purchasing Managers job title above to see the picture below.

Clicking on Purchasing Managers in the previous picture leads to information about the career like detailed job descriptions, job outlook, and average wages.

If the database for the site you're using doesn’t have an exact match for your job, try searching by key words related to your job to find the closest match available. That can still be useful for identifying other jobs that are in-demand, match closely with your current role, or seem interesting to you.

Identifying and documenting all skills you have

You have more skills than you think you have. By taking the time to sit down and identify the full depth and breadth of your skills, you give yourself the best opportunity to identify and land yourself a better paying job that you’ll at least somewhat like and do decently well. The parachute book has a few chapters that guide you through this exercise in detail, but you can simply start by brainstorming with a sheet of paper (physical or digital) and start your list. Give some thought to how to best organize your list of skills into categories so it’s easier to work with when you write your resume or tell others in conversation what you have to offer. How to do this is completely up to you, and you can change how to organize your list whenever you need to (either writing each skill on its own sticky note or digitally documenting your skills might make this easier). Once you’ve listed as many skills as you possibly can, go to your support person (and maybe a few others) and ask them if they can identify any skills they’ve observed in you that aren’t listed.

Planning your next job as part of a larger career

While the basic goal of this post and the whole Job Seeker series is to help you get a better paying job soon, it makes sense to try to land one that is a steppingstone to other jobs beyond. It’s natural for people to want to continue growing over time, and just as you want to move up from your current job, a few years from now you’ll probably want to move up again, continuing to earn more money and advance in a career.

Again, the parachute book comes in handy for this section. It includes a guide for how to not only identify transferrable skills, but also how to gain skills in steppingstone jobs that help you be fully prepared for your dream job further down the road. If you’re not sure what your dream job is yet, that’s okay. Then it might make more sense to just focus on getting a higher paying job. That said, keep this concept and the book in mind for when you do decide on what your dream job is, and then start planning out your path to that job through other ones that will give you the requisite skills and experience.

Conclusion

Assess how prepared you are to move up to a higher paying job today. There are tools available for you to compare skills between your current (or most recent) job and other jobs out there. Take a full inventory of all skills you think you have, then check with at least one other person to make sure you didn’t miss anything. After you’ve done those things, consider how your next job will not only pay better but also help you get to future jobs that pay even better, and eventually help you land your dream job as the pinnacle of your career. Doing all these things will help further illuminate all the possibilities within your career landscape!

Log into your job seeker account and complete your Compare Skills assessment right away!

The next step on the roadmap: Assessing Your Interests

Completing and Reviewing Your Job Seeker Assessments

Continuing the Job Seeker series from the previous two posts, using CareerForce  assessments as examples, this post will guide you through the CareerForce Employment Readiness Assessment. This is a simple 12-question survey that makes today’s assignment seem light. However, be sure to plan on time to review the results of your assessment, as CareerForce makes some helpful recommendations based on your answers. Many recommendations will have links to other pages that you should not expect to fully explore in one day; make a calendar of future days you will dedicate to reviewing these items more in-depth. Some of these recommendations will include other CareerForce assessments (Compare Skills, Interest Assessment, and Skills Matcher) as well as mainstay employment topics: resumes, cover letters, applications, interviewing, and networking. These will all be addressed over the next several Accelearnate posts.

Here are the main actions for you to take today after reading this post:

-            Log into your job seeker account and complete your Employment Readiness Assessment, if one is available

o   Be sure to save your results for future reference

o   If one is not available on your state’s job seeker website, you might benefit from taking the CareerForce assessment and exploring some recommended webpages, knowing you won’t be eligible for appointments, events, or other such personal support if you’re not a Minnesota resident

-            Read through the results of your assessment for any quick actions to take today

-            Mark your calendar with future events to investigate the more in-depth topics soon

Complete your Employment Readiness Assessment

Logging into your CareerForce account and completing this assessment should take you about five minutes. It’s only twelve straightforward questions; the time-consuming part will be exploring all the recommendations after completing the assessment. Be sure to keep your results for future reference and to help you retrieve links to recommended resources later; while you can save your completed assessment in a .pdf format, the links in the file won’t be clickable. Instead, click on the Printable Version button at the bottom of your assessment and keep the results webpage that opens open for the next several days, so the recommended hyperlinks are conveniently available to click on as you have time to explore them.

Review results and take quick actions

As you read through your assessment results, make a list of actions that seem doable in the time you have available today. This might include visiting a handful of web pages and taking notes on anything new you discover or any gaps in your readiness that should be addressed right away. Use today primarily to get a feel for your current employment readiness position, as knowing where you stand now will help you understand how to reach any specific employment or career milestones you want to achieve in the future.

Mark your calendar for deeper dives

Save further assessments or setting up other accounts for future days. As mentioned in previous posts (and as will be reiterated regularly ongoing), the most important key to success on the Accelerated Learning Roadmap for Success (ALRS) is to be consistent; accomplish a small amount each day and pace yourself so you don’t burn out and give up. It might be tempting to do a lot in one day if you have the time, but instead, try to focus your energy and excitement on building a consistent daily habit instead of explosive, short-lived bursts of effort. By putting events on your calendar to learn more deeply about bigger topics, you’ll be reminded to come back to them soon while getting through it all at a sustainable pace.

Conclusion

Use this day to get a general overview of where you currently stand on your journey to earn more money and launch your career. This assessment is a starting point for more specific things to work on over the next several days. Keep working through all the information in bite-sized chunks to make it manageable and avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Take five minutes to log into your account and complete your assessment right away!

The next step on the roadmap: Identifying Skills for a Better Paying Job