Assessing your Interests, Values, and Abilities to Guide Career Exploration
Summary
The purpose of this activity is to help students create a list of interests, abilities, and values that will help guide their thinking about potential careers. Not all of our interests, abilities, and values need to be part of our career, but some of them should be. This assignment will help students identify, reflect on, and prioritize characteristics of potential careers that are important to them.
Context
Audience
I use this activity at the beginning of a course on career planning and exploration in the geosciences, but it could be inserted into any course in which you want students to think about future careers.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
No special skills or concepts must be mastered before beginning this activity.
How the activity is situated in the course
This activity is used as a starting point to help students think about what aspects of themselves are important to consider when thinking about future careers (e.g., I like working independently with little supervision; I want a job that uses my computational skills).
Goals
Content/concepts goals for this activity
This activity is about self reflection, recognizing interests, values, and abilities, and deciding which of those interests, values, and abilities are important to connect to a future career, and which may not be important to a career (but can still be important in life!)
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
This activity involves evaluating and synthesizing interests, values, and abilities as they related to careers.
Skills goals for this activity
This activity involves self reflection.
Description and Teaching Materials
This activity asks students to consider questions and scenarios to help them identify their interests, values, and abilities and to evaluate how they relate to career planning.
I use this as an in-class activity guided by a series of slides, but it could be used as an out-of-class homework assignment.
class slides for interests, values, abilities activity (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 63kB Sep26 25)
Teaching Notes and Tips
Slide 2: Introduces the purpose of the activity and what students will do.
Slides 3-5: Each slide includes a list of questions that will help students identify their interests, values and abilities. For each slide, you can introduce the questions and then give students ~5 minutes per slide to take notes about their ideas. You may ask students to share some of the things they identified either with a neighbor or with the whole class after they have had time to reflect.
Slides 7-10: Each slide describes job-related scenario to help students identify and articulate their values. After introducing each scenario you can give students a moment to think on their own, then discuss the scenario with a neighbor or two, and then have groups report their ideas to the class. Provide space for the discussion of any differing ideas.
Slide 11: Describes the next steps-- list/name your interests, values, and abilities, and then organize them into three separate lists that identify which are essential to your ideal career, not important to your career, and desirable to your career.
Slide 12: Gives an example of how the instructor identified their interests, values, and abilities (step 1) [modify to reflect yourself]
Slide 13: Gives an example of how the instructor re-organized those interests, values, and abilities to identify which were important/not important to their career (step 2) [modify to reflect yourself]
Give students 10 minutes to complete steps 1 and 2 for themselves. You may ask for student volunteers to identify the things they listed as essential for their career, or have students discuss their table with a neighbor.
Assessment
If students participated in the class discussion and complete an organized table (see slide 13) then they have met the goals of the activity. I use this activity for formative assessment.