Career Exploration
Finding the right career for you starts with Exploration!
Career exploration is a process of self-assessment and investigation of your strengths, skills, values, and interests. Your experienced Career & Transfer Services staff are here to help students gather information about potential career options and guide students through the exploration process with discussions and assessments.
Students are encouraged to conduct a self-assessment of skills, strengths, values, and interests in order to then connect these results to potential career paths. Next steps can include researching career paths, taking interesting college courses, coordinating a volunteer experience, and/or scheduling an informational interview with staff, faculty, or community members in a career field of interest.
One of the best tools for self-assessment is the FOCUS2 Career!
FOCUS2 Career helps students receive personalized career options and SUNY CCC majors to pursue through self-assessments, and offers links to further research career options! This tool is useful to current students who are undecided or changing their major, soon-to-be graduates, and SUNY CCC alumni.
To complete a FREE FOCUS2 Career Account:
- Go to FOCUS2 website
- Click on 'Register'
- Enter access code: corning (case sensitive)
- Create your account with a username and password
Additional Resources for Career Exploration
Earn College Credit for Career Exploration:
- Enroll in CRPL 1010: Career Directions
Students will explore careers through self-analysis and consideration of the job outlook. Career and college planning will be conducted through self-assessing interests, values and skills as well as defining short and long-range career goals. Includes FOCUS career assessment, career research and informational interviewing. Credits: 1.
More Assessments for Personality, Strengths, and Skills:
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16Personalities - a personality framework that provides insight into how a person makes decisions, interacts with other people, and processes information. Although based off of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), this is a free version that offers very similar results. This is helpful for understanding your personality, how you would interact with your work/team environment, and what careers you might be more successful in.
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VIA Character Strengths - a free, scientific survey that allows users to assess their greatest strengths. Knowing your strengths allows you to understand what job areas you may excel at and accomplish goals.
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SkillsMatcher - This assessment takes you through a series of questions that allow you to identify skills and activities you currently have. This is great to for identifying occupations you can currently excel at or identify skill areas to be worked on for your goal career.
Researching Careers:
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O*Net Online - a U.S. Department of Labor website that provides great industry specific information on careers and offers an interest profiler called MyNextMove.
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CareerOneStop - is a flagship career, training, and job search website for the U.S. Department of Labor. The website serves job seekers, businesses, students, and career advisors with a variety of free online tools, information and resources.
Understanding Job Availability/Market Outlook:
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U.S. Bureau of Labor Occupational Outlook Handbook - provides national and state data on popular occupations, as well as expected job growth outlooks
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NYS Jobs In Demand - a New York State data portal that shows what industries/jobs are in high demand now and predicted for the future
Careers by Majors:
What's Next?
Students are encouraged to engage in opportunities that allow them to experiment with a career field. This an important next step in the career planning process that gives students the chance to explore a career/career field without committing fully to that career or field.
Students can experiment by:
- signing up for a free Forage account. Forage allows students to engage in virtual job simulations to experience a day-in-the-life at real companies like PwC, Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo, and more, with no strings attached.
- taking an interesting college course
- attend on-campus employer presentations or information table
- organize an informational interview with staff, faculty, alumni, or a community member
- visiting a college class for a day
- job shadowing
- volunteering