Identify your career options

A clear understanding of how your individual values and interests relate to your career goes a long way towards a satisfying working life. This level of self-awareness will help you choose work that is a good fit with your values and interests. Ask yourself:

• What do I want to achieve in work? How will my principles affect my working environment? (values)
• What specific things motivate me? Which area(s) of the workforce do I see myself making a valuable contribution? (interests)

Self-assessment resources

• TypeFocus Personality Type Profile
• MU Career Centre Career Interest Game
  This game from the University of Missouri will help you work out how your personality might fit with specific work environments and careers.

Researching jobs and occupations

Here are a few ideas to get you started with gathering information about your career choice:

• Meet employers and get career advice at CDES Events.
• For job outlines, see the jobs database on the Careers NZ website.
• Join your professional association.
• Get work experience or volunteer, see the Internships and Volunteering pages on the CDES website for more information.

Working in New Zealand

Whether you're a NZ citizen or resident or a work visa holder, it's important to know your employment rights and responsibilities.

• Visit the Employment New Zealand website for more information on working in New Zealand.
• Access free online modules that will introduce you to your employment rights, pay and wages, employment agreements, working arrangements and other vital topics.
• If you have any issues, you can access Employment New Zealand's Early Resolution and Mediation services.
• Access the Employment Agreement Builder – to help create a tailored employment contract.
• Information on reporting migrant worker exploitation and Migrant Exploitation Protection Visa.

Gather information on your options and yourself

Examine the information and resources you already have. Seek out new information to fill any gaps. Develop a real understanding of yourself - what are your skills, interests, values, personal qualities, strengths and weaknesses? For ideas on how to do this, see:

• Explore your career possibilities

Evaluate options

Use one or more of the evaluation techniques described below. If it helps, discuss your options with another person or a Career Development and Employability Consultant.

Select one of the options

Based on the information you have gathered and analysed, select the best option. If you do not have enough information to choose one option over another, you may need to do more research. You may wish to identify your best alternatives too: your plan A, B and C.

Make a plan and implement the decision

Identify what information or resources you need to follow through on your decision. Identify possible obstacles to implementing your decision and plan to overcome them. Try not to worry about your decision: if you have fully assessed the situation and all possible outcomes, you have nothing to fear. Whichever option you take, there will be benefits: new experiences, opportunities to find out more about who you are and what you want.

Review the decision

Reflect on how you made your decision and how successful the outcome was. Think about how you can use what you learned when making future decisions.

Need help?

Talk to a Career Development and Employability Consultant for help with any part of this process.

Pros and cons method

• Consider all the information you have gathered about your options and yourself.
• Write down all the reasons you can think of in favour of a particular option (pro).
• Write down all the reasons against that option (con).
• Assign a score to each reason (pro and con) on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the strongest.
• Add up the scores and compare the results.
• If the cons win, make a list of alternatives to the decision. One of those may jump out as the preferred option. Otherwise, you can then repeat the exercise for each alternative.

Values analysis

Start by thinking about your values, what's most important to you in your life and in work. Do you want to spend time helping others, developing expertise, making money, working in a team etc.? Career Development and Employability Services can help you identify your values through a range of activities. Then, measure your options against your values. Which option(s) will most closely match your values?

"What If…" approach

Imagine that you have decided on one of the options before you. Work through the option (e.g. "What if I decided to do post graduate study?"), imagine you have taken that decision and imagine the consequences.

How do you feel about that decision? Do you feel excited, relieved, regretful, happy, sad? Is your body tense, relaxed? You could rank each response on a 1-5 scale to indicate how significant they are to you. Then imagine that you have decided on one of the other options and imagine the consequences. Our feelings can give us strong clues about which decision is right for us.

Creative decision-making

A career is an evolving process, and in our rapidly changing world an ability to be flexible about decisions and positive about uncertainty are valuable skills. This approach encourages you to accept that uncertainty is real and a positive part of decision-making. Becoming too focused on a particular decision early on can prevent you from seeing other possibilities.

A way to use this approach is to divide a sheet of paper into four quarters with headings:

• Short-Term Positive
• Short-Term Negative
• Long-Term Positive
• Long-Term Negative

For each option you are considering write down all the possible outcomes you can think of under each heading, however unlikely they may be. Then ask yourself, "'What else could I do and what else could happen?".