chapter 1

• Career development


  Where you will be after you graduate, how you will spend most of your hours for the next 40 years, opportunities for personal satisfaction and growth, ability to meet family's needs, ability to retire with sustainable financial resources and enjoy your life
• Career decision


  Do not choose a career solely based on $$$, choose a career that can sustain your family's needs, do not expect shortcuts, career planning process requires time and effort in order to identify and evaluate careers that fit your needs, interests and abilities
• Assessing skills


  Help to learn more about yourself, help to identify your skills, interests, values or other traits, assist you to find careers that fit you the best
• Why do you need to assess your skills?
• What to assess


  • Values: beliefs that guide your way of life
  • Lifestyle goals: the way you would like to spend your time, energy and money
  • Interest: things that you like to do
  • Skills and aptitude: combination of personal qualities, personality and characteristics
• What


  Know your own attributes, select the most satisfying career that you will enjoy
• Why


  Constantly assess personal skills, keep yourself updated with the skills that you are good at in order for it to be added value when you are applying for position that you desires
• When


  Assess your values, lifestyle goals, interests, skills and aptitudes using online survey
• Types of skills


  • Technical skills: Specialised skills and knowledge required to perform specific duties, learned through past experiences and education
  • Transferable skills: Basic skills and knowledge to perform a variety of tasks, will be your greatest asset if the skills can be transferred to another field and employers value their portability
  • Personal skills: Individual attributes such as personality, attitudes, work habit, style of operation, describes who you are and how you would naturally go about doing things
• Transferable skills


  Foundational skills, interpersonal skills, communication skills, problem solving and critical thinking, teamwork, ethics and legal responsibilities, career development, leadership
• Transferable skills


  • It makes the difference between who can do the job and who gets (and keeps) the job, employability skills allow you to: communicate with co-workers, solve problems, understand your role within the team, make responsible choices, take charge of your own career
• A skill assessment can't tell you whether a certain job will make you happy
• Career path


  A sequence of jobs that leads to your short-and long-term career goals, it typically refers to either your path through an industry or your path through an organization, it maps the route an employee takes from a lower-level position through successive roles to arrive at ultimate goal
• Steps to create career path

  1. Learn about potential career options

  2. Discover growing job markets

  3. Identify careers that match your skills

  4. Understand career qualifications

  5. Assess salaries and other benefits

  6. Compare possible career paths

  7. Establish SMART goals

  8. Develop a career path plan