Helpful Career Data Resources to Help You Dig In On Your Career Change Ideas

Career data available online can be helpful in determining if the career change options you’re considering will work for you.  I recommend digging in on these resources after you’ve executed the career research interviews and career experiment strategies I discussed in the previous 2 blogs, for this reason:

When you identify an area that intrigues you and pull up some statistics or specifications on it, often you’ll see too many roadblocks right away. Like, “Oh, I don’t have that training” or “Oh, it’s not going to pay enough.” Yet when you explore through career research interviews and career experiments, you’re going to get a bigger-picture perspective from people who are actually succeeding in those areas, things that may not be as obvious on the career data sites.

Some helpful sites for you to check out:

• Careeronestop.org: This is a government career information site. When you get there, you’ll see on the front page there’s different ways to look at information. You want to get to the part that allows you to put in some job titles. Note: the system does not cover every single title you can imagine. There’s a set number, but as you type keywords, in it will pull up related titles to help you locate the specialty you’re seeking, or something close to it.

Click on the title(s) you want to learn about, and you can read details regarding job duties, average pay, projected demand, and typical training required. And, for most specialties, they’ve created a video that’s kind of like a job shadow in that it gives you a chance to see what people in that specialty are doing.

• LinkedIn: You can use LinkedIn for research by inputting job titles and then looking at profiles of people with that position. Depending on the profile content, it will give a description of their work. And that’s the way for you to find out what you’d be doing if you were in that specialty. This is also a resource to find people for career research interviews (previous blog).

  You can also check out job postings on LinkedIn for career specialties that interest you. You may not be ready to actually start applying to jobs, but if you want to find out more about what the requirements would look like, then you can input a title on LinkedIn, go to the jobs tab, it’ll pull up positions where you can read about the descriptions.

To find right career fit for you, I recommend executing exploration activities from each of the categories we’ve discussed: career research interviews, career experiments, and career data resources. As you’re going through your exploration, ask yourself, “Is this getting me closer, or is this taking me further away?”

Really trust your gut on that. “What fits? What didn’t? And what’s a good logical next step for me around this investigation?” And stick with it. If you think about what it takes to find a life partner, to use another example of a great big huge decision, it’s something that takes place over time. You have to kiss a lot of frogs. If you do find someone you kind of click with, you want a date for a while before committing. So view this as a bit of a marathon but a worthwhile one.

I’ve got another quote for you here: “They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.” I love this quote. It reminds me of another analogy. When you’re driving a car at night, you can only see as far as your headlights, but when you go around corner you see more. And so by moving forward, you’re going to discover more in the direction of where you want to go. And the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.