The career planning process begins with self-assessment. Knowing your interests, values, skills, and personality traits is essential to finding a satisfying career and realizing your professional goals and dreams. Completing self-assessment exercises (Self-Assessment Exercise #1: Your Profile and Self-Assessment Exercise #2: Hometown Newspaper Exercise) will help you develop effective tools for career decision-making and find the best career "fit" for you. The knowledge you acquire will help you compare and evaluate your needs with those of internship sponsors, employers or graduate schools.
Many books, Web sites, and career inventories (see examples below) offer self-assessment tools. Allow yourself the freedom to explore the dimensions of who you are and what you do well. There are no right or wrong answers to any of the questions posed in the exercises. Answer as you see fit, not how you believe your parents, friends, or others would like you to respond. A career counselor can help you summarize the information gained from individual exercises and help you identify career fields and professions about which you might want to learn more.
Career Inventories Offered by CWS
The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality assessment tool that is derived from Carl Jung's psychological types. Career counseling professionals widely use this instrument to help individuals realize their personal preferences, strengths and weaknesses, and how they contribute to career choices. To ensure that the results are appropriately understood, discuss your needs and expectations with a counselor before taking the MBTI and schedule an interpretive meeting after you complete the paper-and-pencil survey. No fee is required. Each semester, a group MBTI interpretation workshop is offered. Check the CWS Calendar for details.
Focus is a Web-based program that, through a series of exercises, helps you identify career possibilities of interest. The program will assist you to evaluate your values and skills, and explore and analyze occupations based on your personal profile and educational training. You can use Focus to find and compare aspects of careers such as the nature of the work, educational requirements, and hiring outlook. It takes about 60 minutes to complete the exercises. To use Focus, go to: http://www.wellesley.edu/CWS/focusregistering.html
