Identify Your Career Interests & Passions
To identify your career interests and passions, begin by reflecting on your strengths, values, and activities you enjoy, both professionally and personally. Explore potential careers through research, networking, and hands-on experiences like internships. Utilize career assessment tools and seek feedback from mentors or trusted professionals to gain insights into your career aspirations!
Getting Started
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses:
- What skills do you excel at? What are your areas for development?
- Consider your values:
- What principles are important to you in a career? What motivates you to perform well?
- Reflect on your interests:
- What activities, hobbies, and subjects do you enjoy? What makes you lose track of time?
- Analyze your daily high points:
- What activities or moments in your day bring you the most joy and fulfillment?
- Evaluate your spending habits:
- Where do you invest your time and money? This can reveal your priorities and passions.
- Explore online job boards and career websites:
- Research various roles, required skills, and salary expectations.
- Attend career events and career fairs to network with professionals:
- Connect with individuals in fields that pique your interest and ask for informational interviews to gain insights into their work.
- Consider job shadowing or internships:
- These hands-on experiences can provide valuable insights into a career’s day-to-day responsibilities.
- Utilize career assessment tools:
- These tools can help you identify potential matches based on your skills and interests.
- Set clear career goals:
- What do you want to achieve in your career? What type of lifestyle do you aspire to?
- Create a plan:
- Develop a roadmap for achieving your career goals, including steps for education, training, and networking.
- Seek feedback from others:
- Talk to trusted SNHU Career Advisor, mentors, friends, and family members to gain different perspectives on your career aspirations.
- Be open to new experiences:
- Don’t be afraid to try new things and explore different career paths until you find what truly resonates with you.
- Demonstrate your passion in interviews:
- Highlight your interests and how they align with the role and company.
SNHU Career Assessment Test : AWATO
AWATO is a free personalized career pathfinding platform that builds individual career plans for every SNHU online student & alumni. If you have questions regarding your AWATO career assessment results, contact our SNHU Career Services team for help.
- A career assessment is a test that features various questions, and the answers you provide can help you discover more about your professional goals.
- This test may involve factors like your personality, interests, strengths and values.
- Understanding how to use career assessments can help you find a career that you enjoy!
- Interests
- Interests are the hobbies and passions you want to pursue in life. This aspect of a career assessment is important because it helps determine which careers and tasks you may enjoy. When you enjoy the work you do, you can remain more attentive and productive and experience higher job satisfaction.
- Personality
- Consider how your behaviors reflect on your activities throughout the day. Some career assessments evaluate your personality. Knowing which traits you have is not necessarily a guiding factor in determining your career, but it can help you get a better idea of which jobs suit your personality the best. For example, if you enjoy communicating with people and have more extroverted traits you may want to pursue a career as an event planner, mediator or sales manager. If you have more introverted traits you may want to pursue a career as a data scientist or nature photographer.
- Aptitude and Skills
- Many career assessments measure aptitude, which is your ability to perform a task without practice. You may be intuitively effective at solving problems or building things and have been this way since childhood. Some people are great analytical thinkers who thrive on working with numbers and data, while others crave creativity and being able to make something unique. Career assessments can also measure how well you perform learned skills like communication, typing and coding. The skills and aptitude you have may help determine the industry in which you can apply yourself best.
- Values
- Your personality is the result of your values. The way that you interact with others and handle situations depends on the values that you develop early in life and how you maintain them as you grow older. Career assessments can help you learn which careers best fit your current values. Demanding careers may not work well for someone who values a healthy work-life balance. If you enjoy helping people, you may want to work in a service-oriented career that benefits a specific group of people or the general public.
- The results of a career assessment can help you learn which careers may suit you best and which areas of your professional development require improvement.
- You may not realize which strengths or weaknesses you have until you’ve taken one of these tests.
- After taking a career assessment, you may be able to view a list of jobs that match your personality and interests.
