DEVELOPING YOUR CAREER IDEAS
Five steps for better career planning Take time to understand what you enjoy most and what helps you succeed. Combine these insights with research into your preferred options to make decisions and take action. 1
What you do and what you like best…
Use Oxford’s Career Weaver app to explore what interests and motivates you most. Reflect on past experiences that have given you a sense of enjoyment, achievement or real satisfaction. Consider how you decided which subject to study and which elements of your current studies most engage you. Examine your extra-curricular activities and ask yourself: What appealed to you when you chose a specific activity? What has given you most satisfaction? What have you learned or gained from your extracurricular activities? What are your reasons for continuing with it? Or, perhaps, for stopping? Link these questions to the prompts in the table on the next page to begin to better understand your personal pattern of career interests and motivations.
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What is your personal pattern?
Our Career Weaver tool helps you to think about what you value most in your working environment. It provides a rich variety of short exercises to stimulate and structure your thinking and helps you to identify and describe: What you love. What you are good at. Why you do what you choose to do. Use your SSO to open your personal account at www.careerweaver.ox.ac.uk and begin to explore, define and explain your most important drivers and best examples.
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www.careers.ox.ac.uk
Your strengths and skills are also important and you can develop existing skills and learn new ones whilst at University. Start with the eight employability skills listed below and consider what you are good at and what you really enjoy doing. Think about your range of skills: Where have you developed and used them? How do you like to use and apply them, both in your studies and extra-curricular activities? See Generating Career Ideas at www.careers.ox.ac. uk/generating-career-ideas to learn more about using Career Weaver and a variety of additional tools and ideas you can use, including: Psychometric tools based on short questionnaires, including Prospects Career Planner Reference books at the Careers Service, including Build Your Own Rainbow, Where Am I Going And Can I Have A Map?, and What Color Is Your Parachute? Book an appointment with a careers adviser to discuss any questions you have and for advice on how to interpret and apply the insights gained.
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Core employability skills The next chapter defines the ‘transferable’ employability skills listed below and reviews many options to practise and develop them. Business awareness Communication Creativity Initiative Leadership Planning Self-management Teamwork In addition to these core employability skills, some jobs require specific skills such as languages, computing and IT, or even specific laboratory skills.
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