Assessing Your Interests and Values
- Watch the following video on the Five-Step Career Decision Making Process which includes:
1. Self-Assessment
2. Identify and Research Options
3. Evaluate and Prioritize
4. Take Action and Try Options
5. Reflect and Re-evaluate
- Utilize our Design Your Career: Online Tool based on Stanford University’s innovative approach to applying Design Thinking principles to career decision-making.
- The Empathize page within this tool allows you to reflect on your Values, Interests, and Skills.
- Visit our designated page for more information on Designing Your Career@Yale.
- There are also Individual Development Plans that can help you with this self-assessment and are especially helpful for graduate students.
Consider both the Job Function and IndustryÂ
- When researching various career pathways and jobs, it’s important to look at both the industry and job function.
- Industry refers to a field, often named for its primary product/service, such as the Aerospace or Technology Industry.
- Job functions are the roles within an industry, such as an engineer or marketing expert, and are often found in all industries.
- For example, Jane is a finance manager at Google, so she is in the technology industry, but her job function is finance.
- The job function is the expertise you build and is transferable throughout your career, across industries.
Career Pathways
- Explore a broad range of career paths and interest areas. Students are not limited to just one career pathway and OCS recommends exploring broadly across several fields. Select Explore Careers at the top menu to view over 20 specific pages on industries and graduate school with events, articles, job postings for that particular topic.
Skills Evaluation
- Use the Skills Discovery Tool below to identify the most important skills needed for a specific job title, industry, or occupation.