• Get ready for your career in science
• You and the job you want
• What is self assessment?
• Finding career direction
• Definition of skills and attributes
• Identify your own skills and attributes
• Produce a work related summary of your skills and attributes
• Keeping records
• Building your career portfolio further
• Setting goals
• Employers and the labour market
• Practical Skills to Find Work
• Useful Resources

You and the job you want

Finding a career direction

Hopefully this exercise gave you a good starting point for reflecting on factors that will affect how you make your career decisions.   It is not written in stone, so you can add, change, and delete any of the information at any point of time to keep it helpful to yourself.

When exploring career options it can be useful to evaluate if it matches your preferences from the following perspectives:

• Temperament
• This refers to features of your personality that may influence your job choices eg are you energetic, outgoing, enjoy a challenge, calm under pressure, diplomatic, resilient in times of stress, self confident, self motivated, tactful, enjoy lots of activity around you, prefer quieter environments

• Preferred working style
• This means the way that you like to work eg enjoy team work, like to work independently, like a mix of both, like lots of responsibility, prefer to be directed, enjoy flexible hours, like a structured routine, want to multi-task, like to focus on one project at a time, like small/large organisations, happy/not happy to travel/relocate

• Values
• These are beliefs or philosophies that guide you through life and help you make both personal and professional decisions.  They are the things that are most important to you and can be drivers in making career choices.

• Rewards
• What are some of the incentives for you to apply for a particular job role?  What are some of the indicators that a job will offer satisfaction?  Eg challenge, stability, monetary gain, socially important, status, promotional opportunities, helping others, opportunity for travel, the opportunity to do activities and tasks you are most interested in