Career Exploration

Career Exploration Project Guidelines

The purpose of this project is to give you an opportunity to explore a possible career and to better understand human resource management concepts. While there is not one best way to collect the information, this document provides guidelines that should help to create a more meaningful project experience and a better report.

1. Pick a Job or Career

Start by thinking of a career you would like to have a few years after your college graduation. You may have a general idea, such as “finance” or a more specific idea, such as “manager of a clothing store”. (If you do not have a general or specific idea of what you would like to do after graduation, you should reverse the order of steps 2 and 3.)

2. Find Information About Your Job/Career on O*NET

Once you know the job or career you are interested in, you should go to 0*Net (http://online.onetcenter.org/). This is a website created for the U.S. Department of Labor. You will see on the main page that, “O*NET OnLine has detailed descriptions of the world of work for use by job seekers, workforce development and HR professionals, students, researchers, and more!” While you will be looking at O*Net from the perspective of a student, and possibly a job seeker, there are HR professionals who also rely on this tool to analyze the jobs that they have in their organizations, to look at compensation rates for jobs, and to anticipate the demand for and supply of potential job applicants.

• In the Occupation Search box, type in your career or job. You will likely then need to choose from a list of jobs. You will need to choose a specific job from this list.

• Once you choose a job, you will see a summary of information related to that job. You should review the tasks for the job and make a chart listing what you think are the five most important tasks for the job. You will also see sections for the tools, knowledge, skills, abilities, and work activities for...