industry connectED

Career Coaching Fellowship

ASSESSMENT: EXPLORE YOUR TRAITS

Get to know your interests, personality, and the skills you have to offer in the workforce. Record your results on your profile.

Interests and Personality:

Holland Codes

One of the approaches to exploring careers is to investigate careers whose tasks and work environment are a match for what you like to do and your personality. To help you make the match, Psychologist John Holland identified a general set of 6 personality types that apply to both people and work environments. Some refer to these six categories as Holland Codes or RIASEC. Most people are some combination of three Holland personality types.⁠ These codes are a generalization and may not fit you exactly, but they can be a start to help you understand some of your traits and explore careers that might match and bring you satisfaction.

Image credit: Workipedia by MyCareersFuture

Here is a breakdown of what each of the Holland personality types means:

🔨 Realistic (Doers) types enjoy work activities that include practical hands-on problems and solutions.⁠

🔍 Investigative (Thinkers) types enjoy working with ideas, facts, and figuring out problems mentally.⁠

🧑‍🎨 Artistic (Creators) types enjoy working with forms, designs and patterns. They prefer work that can be done without following a clear set of rules.⁠

❤️ Social (Helpers) types enjoy working with, communicating with, and teaching people. They like to be of service to others.⁠

💲 Enterprising (Persuaders) types enjoy occupations that involve leading people, making decisions and starting up and carrying out projects.

📂 Conventional (Organizers) types enjoy working with data and details more than with ideas. They like having set procedures and routines.⁠

Do you know your Holland Code? ⁠ If you want to find out your code, here is a free assessment: Digital | PDF

Skills: Debruce© Agilities

No matter where you are at in life, you have strengths, interests, and skills that bring value to the workforce. The DeBruce Foundation offers a tool to help you understand how you rank in ten categories of skills found in all jobs. They call these skills categories Agilities and chose this term to help promote both the fact that all people have skills that could transfer and apply to a wide variety of jobs and that a person can improve on an Agility over time.

Explore the 10 Agility Categories: Leveraging Your Agilities | Agilities for Elementary

Find out your Agility Ranking: Agile Work Profiler

INVESTIGATE: EXPLORE CAREER OPTIONS & MATCHES

Explore the variety of careers that exist in our national economy and learn about different jobs.

Find categorized career lists and information organized by Holland Code: O*NET
Find categorized career lists and information organized by Career Cluster: Indiana Career Explorer

EVALUATE YOUR OPTIONS

Career decisions are complex and can be overwhelming. In this section, you’ll find a few tools to help you evaluate and potentially narrow down your career options. You’ll find a decision-making matrix tool, a work values tool that can be used to determine criteria for the decision-making matrix, and a tool that estimates how much income you’ll need to afford your desired lifestyle.

Decisions Making Matrix

Using a Decision Making Matrix may help you organize your thoughts and the information you’ve gathered about your potential career choices.

Examples:

Image credit: Indiana University Kelley School of Business | Kelley Connect

For the Career Decision Making Matrix criteria column, you could use

Factors That Impact Your Decision like work schedule, job availability, pay, location, prestige, time for social life, work environment, stability/job outlook, etc.
Work Values. Work Values give you a sense of fulfillment and purpose; they are your beliefs about what has worth, importance and meaning in your life.

Explore your work values: Work Values Inventory

Will You Be Able To Afford Your Desired Lifestyle?

Explore this tool that estimates the true cost of the lifestyle you want and how much you’ll need to earn to afford it.