Career Exploration

Career Exploration is the process where you determine and then take your unique career preferences whilst learning about various occupations and establish the best fit between them. Ideally, you engage in career exploration during or after identifying your career preferences through self-assessment.

Career Exploration improves your knowledge of career options, as you learn about:

• Career Preferences: Identifying the work tasks you prefer, the way you like to interact with others and the type of workplaces you might want to work in.
• Career Clusters: There are 16 Career Clusters by classifying specific jobs and industries into similar categories. Occupations that are grouped together will share certain features, themes or require similar skills.
• Career Pathways: Within each Career Cluster are job industry and occupation types known as pathways. Pathways are grouped by the knowledge and skills required for occupations in these career fields and in total there are 79 pathways.
• Career Transitions: This can be moving to a career when you’ve trained for another, or re-entering the workforce after a long gap and also moving into management. It involves the change (external variation) and the transition (internal shift) and ways to manage this effectively.

Given that the world of work rapidly changes and that employment contracts are, the need to reflect upon one’s career options and upon oneself is an ongoing, lifelong process of being plugged into the two major elements of Career Exploration:

• Environmental Exploration which is that investigation of various career options by keeping abreast of developments on jobs, organisations, occupations and industries, and;

• Personal Exploration of own interests, values, experiences and work preferences in order to reflect on one’s career and to gain a deeper understanding of oneself.

Both of these aspects of Career Exploration allow for more informed career decisions.

1. Are there jobs available in this career?
2. What education or training do I need?
3. How much money do I want to make?
4. What do I want to pursue in this career?
5. Where do I want to live?