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Career Exploration

The best careers are those with purpose, where you can combine your values, strengths, and skills to impact something you care about. How do you discover your purpose? By exploring — yourself! Identify the things you value and love to do; then, you can find a career to put those values and skills to work.

You can use different strategies to explore your skills and strengths and how you might apply them to a career.

Reflection: Our career journey begins with knowing ourselves. Self-assessment is discovering and prioritizing your motivations, needs, interests, values, and skills. Once you get some insight into yourself, then you have a clear starting point. You only need one for the journey to begin! Need a place to start? Take Career Coach Assessment to learn about yourself and career suggestions based on your interests. Assessments can provide you with personal insights that can be helpful in considering your career and professional development, but they should not be seen as prescriptive or directive.

Research industries online: You can find many job roles across industries. In the Labor Market Insights, you can discover which industries are in demand, have the largest employment, are experiencing declining employment, pay the most, growth rate, and more.

Gain Experience: There are various opportunities to explore a job role, industry, or organization. Understanding the day-to-day and experiencing employer culture first-hand is an invaluable way to make more informed decisions.

  1. Complete a Virtual Experience
  2. Shadow a professional in the field
  3. Request an informational interview
  4. Applying for a part-time job or internship.

10 signs the early career job market is heating up in May 2026

If you’ve spent the last couple of years feeling like the job market was a high-stakes game of “musical chairs” where the music stopped every five minutes, I have some news for you. Take a deep breath. Shake off that …

By College Recruiter
College Recruiter believes that every student and recent grad deserves a great career.
Read more

Too Young to be an Internship Finder? What High School Students Can Do Before an Opportunity Comes

If you want to be an internship finder as a high school student, but are too young to get an opportunity, the following post offers advice on preparing for one in the future.

Featured: Featured Over the weekend, I spoke …

By College Recruiter
College Recruiter believes that every student and recent grad deserves a great career.
Read more

Top 5 Ways to Use Your Public Library as a Career Exploration Tool

I feel like an expert on this topic, raised by a librarian and living as I do in the newly annointed book reading capital of America: Seattle, at least according to this New York Times article. I use my library …

By College Recruiter
College Recruiter believes that every student and recent grad deserves a great career.
Read more

Resources

Whether you’re a student looking to explore career paths or a faculty/staff member at SOWELA researching content for your curriculum, …

Help job seekers learn about careers in the most in-demand industries! Ready for Industry provides you with knowledge that introduces …

Learn about careers in the most in-demand industries! Ready for Industry provides you with knowledge that introduces the careers, common …

Work Design Magazine is a thoughtfully curated digital publication with a global reach. We focus on the innovative design of …

Labor Market InsightsIn partnership withLightcast logo

Find Career Data with Job Market Insights
- Salary Data
- Emplpoyment trends
- Top Employers
- Skills & competencies
1. search keywords- search using keywords such as skills or job title
2. filter- filter by industry and occupation

Make informed career decisions with live employment data.

First, choose an industry of interest, then filter for occupation. (If you'd like to see data for a specific location only, filter by state.)