Kate, our EmployEd on Campus intern, has been experimenting….
It can feel daunting thinking about work after Uni, especially if you don’t know what you want to do for a job. Heading into my fourth and final year, the question of what I want to do is starting to weigh heavily. I decided to do some thinking during the summer holidays, because even with a full time internship I know I’m less busy now than I will be during the semester.
It was suggested I look at the Career Assessments (located under the Resources tab on MyCareerHub). There are a number of assessments, each tailored to identifying a different set of personal attributes that may influence workplace preferences. I completed the assessments on ‘Strengths’, ‘Workplace Culture’ and ‘Motivation at Work’. The assessments ask you to identify how strongly particular statements apply to you, and produce a report of your attributes and how they may pertain to a workplace.
I have to say, I was highly impressed and excited by the assessments. While really, each assessment is just a simple self-reflection task, I found the prompts to be interesting and the entire process to be engaging. Some of the results were completely spot on, and I was surprised I could be so accurately described from such a simple survey. Even the results that didn’t ring true for me helped me to identify what I felt would instead be a better description. Finally, the section of the report discussing what the implications of the results may mean for me in the workplace were often ideas I hadn’t thought about before, but very much resonated with me. Understanding the features of a workplace that are important to me as a person and employee felt like a huge step towards identifying what sort of specific job opportunities I should be looking for.
So if you’ve been feeling you don’t know where to start, or just want to learn more about what might be important to you in your working life, try clicking your way though some of these Career Assessments. Find them in the Resources tab of MyCareerHub (current UofEd students and recent graduates).
- Prospects’ Planner is a similar tool, accessible to everyone. Find it linked from this page: http://www.ed.ac.uk/careers/your-future/career-planning/career-planner
Nice post, Kate. I will re-post on my Physics careers blog!
Reblogged this on UoE Physics Careers Blog and commented:
Good post by Kate, one of the Careers Service Employ.ed on Campus interns.