CAO HANDBOOK ENTRY 2017
160
1. Find Out what You're Good at
How do I decide what to study?
You may be feeling quite stressed out about making this BIG decision
and unsure how to choose a career that will be right for you... Well –
relax, follow these Self-Help Steps, including the quiz on your working
personality, and you'll be a whole lot more equipped to make a good
choice when you're done!
Knowing which careers or jobs suit you is a process of discovery. The
'Helping you decide on your career' section is about finding out what
you are good at, what kind of person you are, what careers are out there
and then matching this information together. It's also about listening
to your gut feeling because you are the expert on yourself! Very often
you actually know what career directions seem interesting to you, but
you may need some confirmation of this in order to feel more confident
about your choice.
The CAO has included this section to give you more information to help
make your choices. Choosing what to study and knowing what career
direction this will lead you to is a really important choice that will affect
you for a long time. So, put in the effort to gather the right information
about yourself and your career choices.
Self-help steps
On a scale of 1 to 10, rate how ready you feel to make a career choice?
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1 means that you feel very unprepared and 10 means you feel you have
all the information you need to make a good choice. If you've chosen a
number less than 10, you need more preparation, so keep going!
Okay, let's get started with gathering more information to help you to
make a good study choice:
Knowing yourself
To learn more about yourself, you're going to need a pen, no really, you're
going to need to go and get a pen; you've got some self exploring to do!
Look at the descriptions below.
For each number, choose either the
grey
description or the
red
. Circle
the one that sounds most like you.
Using a different colour pen, ask someone who knows you well to circle
the descriptions they think sound like you. On what side do you have
more circled descriptions?
GREY
– Many GREY answers suggest that you enjoy spending
time with many different people for a large part of your day, and meeting
new people. Your future career probably needs to focus a lot on people.
'People's person'
'Your own person'
Confident with large groups of people Someone who enjoys smaller groups of people
Inspired and energised by being with
people a large portion of the day
Someone who enjoys their own company
Friendly and outgoing
Reserved and often a 'deep thinker'
A person who has a wide social
network
Comfortable spending time 'one on one' with a
good friend or a few close friends
Spending the whole weekend going
out with friends and family sounds
like fun
Having some time with friends and family as
well as having some space sounds relaxing
SECTION FOUR HELPING YOU TO DECIDE ON YOUR CAREER
