Career Interests
A simple place to start in identifying your interests is to consider the activities, hobbies and topics that you enjoy and that naturally capture your attention.
Identifying your interests can help you generate ideas of possible majors and career areas to further explore. Below are several activities to help you identify and clarify your areas of interest.
Exploring Your Interests
These questions are designed to help uncover your interests to possibly identify career areas or industries for further exploration.
https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Plan/InterestsBySubjectArea2.pdf
Career clusters are groups of similar occupations and industries. 16 career clusters were identified and developed by the U.S. Department of Education as a way to organize career planning.
Once you have identified and prioritized your interests, skills, values and personality preferences, it is important to “put it all together” to identify themes and general career areas that you’d like to explore further. The following activities are designed to help you do just that. Identifying possible career paths and engaging in exploration will be the next step.
Career Storming
From everything you have learned thus far, use this sheet to capture your interests, personality and preferences, and values and skills to better understand their purpose and meaning for integration into your life.
https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Plan/Career-StormingActivity2.pdf
Your Ideal Job Description
Now that you’ve been able to collect so much valuable information about your interests, skills, values, personality traits and preferences, a helpful next step is to begin visualizing how those attributes will translate into actual job descriptions. It is important to start creating a clearer vision of yourself in the world-of-work, in order to help you both identify and evaluate career paths and possible internship/job opportunities. Using the information gathered earlier in this process, answer the following questions to the best of your ability.
https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Plan/IdealJobDescription2.pdf
Your vision will adapt and update as you learn and grow. After completing these activities how does this inform, clarify, or expand your vision?