Your New Career Year Resolution?

New Year always brings a "new brooms sweep clean" mentality as people clear out their dusty mental cupboards and look for new ways of approaching their life.

This made me think that in career decision terms, the obvious equivalent to "ringing out the old and ringing in the new" would be to take a career interest guide questionnaire.  Generally recommended by Careers Advisers to clients who can think of no or very few career ideas that would interest them, interest guides are also a good way of checking if your career wish list is up to date or whether there are new contenders emerging over the horizon.

Invariably online these days, the system you choose interrogates you about work preferences or personal interests, then spews out a series of career titles that potentially match the inputs you have provided.  At which point Careers Advisers usually hasten to add that you shouldn't expect miracle solutions.  A computer can't tell you what to do - you have to evaluate the possibilities yourself by doing some research.

But where do we find the sort of tools we are talking about?

For students and graduates, the most commonly used system is Prospects Planner from Graduate Prospects.  Revamped this year, its key focus is a belt-and-braces analysis of personal interests and motivational factors.  The distinguishing factor is that the jobs it links to all require a graduate qualification or are commonly entered by graduates.

Perhaps less available than they once where, similar products for a more general market are Kudos (aimed at young people) and Adult Directions (for adults as it says on the tin).  The trick here is to find a local careers guidance or similar agency which has a licence to offer them to the end user, normally without charge.  Adult Directions has a few sophistications which allow you to filter opportunities (e.g. by salary or contract type).  When I last played with it, I particularly liked the fact that you could decide how many questions you need to answer before you think you have clear results.

Recently some of the big jobsites have started to offer interest guides in various forms. Possibly the simplest is the Career Snapshots facility offered by Monster, offering some basic job suggestions that link to a particular interest (e.g. working outdoors, writing).  On the other hand TARGETjobs Career Planner facility is a full thirty minute look at interests, strengths, personality and abilities that produces a full report that is free to those registered on the site. I notice that Fish4jobs also offers personality profiling but this is a charged facility at £8.99 a head, which might be enough to encourage most people look elsewhere.

On the basis of a fairly superficial glance, one of the most comprehensive facilities is offered by the New National Careers Service's so-called Skills Health Checklist. As well as covering interests and motivation, it also distinguishes between skills you like doing and skills you are good at (not always the same thing - I seem to remember it can be an important difference!) and a set of Activity Skills, which is newspeak for what we used to call aptitude tests - the sort of tests that were typically used to see if applicants had the right level of ability in particular areas (e.g. verbal or numerical reasoning).

Also with more than half a foot in the aptitude testing camp, the Morrisby Profile is one test that is still delivered via timed paper and pen sessions of some length, as is the detailed career profile which is produced as a result.  Morrisby claims a "depth of analysis that is not available in other vocational systems" but, unless you're lucky, this deluxe approach is likely to be reflected in the price you will pay for it.

One last word on career profile reports from TARGETjobs: "...don't let it languish unused in a drawer or fester on your hard drive. Book an appointment at your careers service. A careers adviser will be able to talk through the findings, shed additional light on your potential career opportunities and help you assess how you can build your skills."

I'm sure we couldn't agree more!  Very few clients come back to tell us what they found out from completing an interest guide, or to tell us how useful they found them.  Perhaps that should be your second New Career Year Resolution?