Your career appointment is for you. You set the agenda, and you can use the time to explore whatever is an issue for you in moving forward with planning your career.

A careers appointment is part of your process to figure out what are your next steps in education and employment. This process is often ongoing and might change throughout your life. The role of a careers advisor is to help facilitate this process and enable you to develop the skills to plan your career. Ultimately, it will be your efforts and actions that will enable progress. 

A careers advisor will help you with career questions that you may. You may not walk away with all the answers to your questions but you should be closer to finding them.

Common questions that we hear include:

• I don’t know what I want to do for my career, how do I find out?

• What options are there other than University?

• If I do a vocational course, can I still go to University?

• What College courses are available?

• Will I be eligible for the Disabled Student’s Allowance if I go to University?

• How do I apply to an apprenticeship?

 

A careers advisor may:

• Explore your values, motivations and interests

• Gently challenge your beliefs

• Encourage you to reflect on your skills and experience

• Share with you resources and activities to help your career research

• Help you to weigh up your options

• Help you to gain answers to your questions

 

A careers advisor cannot:

• Make a decision for you

• Tell you what career is right for you

• Tell you which employers are recruiting

• Tell you everything about a particular career

 

To make sure you get the most out of your appointments, think about what your goal is for the appointment, make sure this is realistic. Doing even a bit of research and reflection goes a long way in preparing for your appointment. If you think you will need more than one appointment, ask for it.

As you move through education to employment, there are multiple pathways you can take. Which pathway you choose depends on a number of things, for example, how you prefer to learn, whether you know what job you want to do and what grades you achieve. 

You can move between different pathways with a little planning. For example, you may complete your A-levels and then go on to complete a degree apprenticeship. Alternatively, you may complete a vocational level 3 course, such as a BTEC National Extended Diploma and then go on to do a University degree. Knowing what qualifications are required for different courses and jobs enables you to plan ahead and to keep your options open.

The National Careers Service has some amazing information about making career choices here.  

Take a look at the ‘Choose Your Path’ poster below and take a look at the sections below to learn more about what interests you.

 

 

For an interactive overview of the different qualification types and what they mean, Click here.

 

 

Skills reflection

Some skills are unique to a specific job, whilst others are transferable. Transferable skills are those that you can build up over time, through work, volunteering, education and life. You can apply them to a range of jobs and are great on CVs. They include being able to work in a group, use computer software and writing skills.

Watch this video to learn about the difference between ‘hard skills’ and ‘soft skills’:

 

Quizzes

You may want to take a careers/skills quiz to help you:

• Reflect on what interests and motivates you

• Think about your skills and experience

• Find out what jobs suit your skills and interests

 

 

Prospects careers quiz

Use the ‘career planner quiz’ to match your skills, motivations and desires to careers.

Career coach

Here there are both short and long career quizzes and a place to browse career paths. The short career quiz is a great way to reflect on how you like to work and what you value and enjoy- it will also suggest career pathways based on your answers.

Skills assessment

Quiz provides an in-depth analysis of your skills, suggesting jobs based upon this. You can keep adding information to build upon your answers.

Build your skills profile

This quiz is great if you are starting to think about CVs. It asks you questions that get you to think about what skills and experience you have built so far and to work out what you can develop further. It also matches your answers to job areas.

Entrepreneur quiz

This quiz is useful if you think you might like to start your own business. It asks you questions to help you see if starting a business is right for you. 

Build skills and experience

Taking courses and doing work experience/volunteering are great ways to:

• Build skills and experience, increasing your employability

• Learn what motivates you, what you are good at doing and what you enjoy doing

• Learn about what jobs are available and network

 

The National careers service has fantastic resources on how to build your skills here. 

Also:

• Check out the free online courses that you can do in your free time on Future Learn.

• Virtual work experiences can be found on Springpod, Future Learn, and Speakers for Schools. Found out more about virtual work experience here. 

• You can volunteer for the NHS if you are older than 16 years here. 

Contact friends and family to shadow them at work. This can help you to learn what aspects of a job and work environment you do and do not like and looks proactive on a CV.

Searching for jobs and careers

How do I find out about different jobs? CareerPilot provides a few ways to search different jobs, either by looking at job categories or by searching a subject that you are interested in. 

Explore careers is a fantastic website to search any job to learn more about it. At the bottom of the page, they have listed jobs by different categories. Here you can search through the different categories that interest you to find out about jobs that you may not have heard of. 

Labour market information is the information about the job market, such as job availability and job demand. Knowing answers to the below questions can inform what jobs we choose to take and the stability of our future career:

WHAT JOBS HAVE THE MOST GROWTH

WHICH OCCUPATIONS HAVE THE LOWEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE?

WHAT ARE THE BEST PAID JOBS?

A quick way of comparing this information is to use this tool, where you can type in any jobs to compare salaries and whether the job area is growing or declining.

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