Online Career Research
Ø Self-Assessment: Find out who you are and what you want to do with
the rest of your life:
o
Personality
Tests:
§ Enneagram
Institute: Here you can find enneagram personality tests. Read about what they are here.
§ Keirsey.com: The
Keirsey Personality Test so you can find out which of the 4 temperaments you
have.
§ Myers Briggs:
The famous Myers Briggs personality test (I’m an ESTJ; how about you?)
o
Career Skills
Tests: Find out about career-related
skills you may not even know you have:
§ KMC: a
self-assessment of your “transferrable skills.”
Transferrable skills are “skills from coursework, extracurricular
activities and your total life experiences. If you've researched topics and
written, edited and presented papers for classes, you've used skills which are
not limited to any one academic discipline or knowledge area but are
transferable to many occupations.” (Read
more about transferrable skills here.)
§ O-Net
Online: Check off skills you have from a list and O-Net Online will make
career suggestions.
§ Stewart,
Cooper & Coon: a “motivated skills” test: “The Motivated Skills Card
Sort Activity is a quick and easy way to identify the skills which are central
to your career satisfaction and success. Your selections will involve assessing
your proficiency (how effective you are) in various skills, then your
motivation (the strength of your attraction) to use these skills.”
o
Career
Interest Tests: Here are some tests
that suggest possible careers for you based on your interests:
§ CareerKey.org Career
Test: This test “measures the strength of your six
§ HollandCodes.com:
Learn all about Holland Codes and how you can use them to look up occupations
you might be interested in.
§ North Carolina Career
Resource Network: Occupation profiles and their associated
§ Stewart Cooper
& Coon Career Values Test: The web site describes the test as follows:
“The Values Card Sort provides a quick and easy way to clarify what you want in
a career. Accomplishing this activity is like playing solitaire. You have a
deck of cards and will deal them out into several categories. Where you put the
cards will depend upon your feelings. Identify what is important to you,
without regard for what you think other people would say or want you to say.”
§ The
Job Hunter’s Bible and The
Riley Guide have many, many more.
o
Career
Counselors:
§ Job
Hunters Bible: Has links to career counselors, both online and offline.
§ Gil Kempenich: A career counselor I know who gives free
advice on his blog.
§ Riley Guide: Riley
Guide’s list of career counseling, coaching, and mentoring, associations as
well as information about how to find a career counselor, online or offline.
Ø Researching
Careers: Find out more about specific
jobs, including job duties, training and education needed, earnings, job
prospects, working conditions, etc.:
o
Career
Research:
§ BLS.gov:
§ Careers.org:
Complete occupation profiles, including salaries, outlook for profession, and
description of what the career entails.
§ Job-Hunt.org:
Contains number employed, growth forecasts, salaries, and required education
for over 100 careers.
§ Khake.com:
All kinds of job market statistics here from the
§ Occupational Outlook
Handbook: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook
Handbook, 2010-11 edition. The
description on the web site is as follows: “For hundreds of different types of
jobs—such as teacher, lawyer, and nurse—the Occupational Outlook Handbook tells
you the training and education needed, earnings, expected job prospects, what
workers do on the job, working conditions.
In addition, the Handbook gives you job search tips, links to
information about the job market in each state, and more.”
§ RileyGuide:
This is the Riley Guide page with links to different occupational fields so
that you can see statistics and career profiles related to your particular
field.
§ Vault.com: This is a
great site for researching careers.
Vault is where you “Get the inside scoop on the compensation, career
path and other vitals of hot jobs with Vault’s profession profiles.” Users can contribute information to these
profession profiles too.
o
CareerBeam.com: “Virtual career
services.”
o
QuintCareers.com:
An online guide to informational interviewing.
o
Salary
Research: All of these sites
specifically allow you to research salaries for your chosen career: GlassDoor.com, BLR.com,
Payscale.com, Salary.com, SalaryExpert.com, ActiveBizPros.com
Ø Researching
Companies: Find out more about
the company(ies) you might want to work for:
o
Business.com: Richard Bolles describes this
site as: “a pretty extensive directory of businesses, organized by industry,
with links to their home pages. How extensive? Ten thousand public companies,
44,000 private companies, and 14,000 international companies….”
o
ThomasNet:
Research industrial companies by what type of products they manufacture. Then get statistics on that company’s number
of employees, annual sales, names of contact people, etc.
o
Vault.com: Vault gives
information about more than 10,000 companies, including company profiles
rankings, community reviews, salary information, etc.
o
VirtualChase: This
page contains links to over 65 additional company research web sites! Each web site is linked to and described in a
paragraph.
o
Yahoo!
Company Directory: Broken down by industry.
Has links to company web sites.
o
Job
Hunters Bible: This is a link to Richard Bolles’ page describing research
sites for those who want to be self-employed and/or work from home.
o
Manta.com: Especially good for small business
research.
A good general research site is http://www.employmentresources.info/,
described as: “A Subject Tracer™ Information Blog developed and created by
Internet expert, author, keynote speaker and consultant Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. for monitoring employment resources
and sites on the Internet.”