Building Your Career: A Guide to Your Future

This unique hands-on workbook equips readers with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors required to make effective educational and career decisions. Using a wide variety of exercises and innovative worksheets, users pull together personal, family/social, and career traits, preferences and conditions, and use thisself-informationto explore relevant occupational clusters that are presented in terms of both a current and future-oriented workplace. The workbook moves readers systematically through a decision-making cycle of Awareness, Exploration, Choice, and Commitment.Getting Ready. What Do I Need to Know About Myself? What Do I Need to Know About Occupational Alternatives? What Do I Need to Know About Educational Alternatives? How Will I Decide? How Will I Gain a Psychological Edge? How Will I Advance My Career? The Job Search and Resume Writing. Am I the Best Candidate? Job Leads and the Job Interview. Where Do I Go from Here?For anyone involved in, or contemplating, an educational or career decision.

Planning and building a career is a lifelong process requiring a broad base of critical knowledge and skills. Individuals will have to draw upon this base many times as they explore, remain in, and change careers. Although some individuals plan ahead for effective career decisions, many others make career decisions only as the need arises--or even allow circumstances to dictate their careers, sometimes with less than satisfactory results. This third edition ofBuilding Your Careerseeks to equip individuals with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors required to make effective educational and career decisions. The book's detailed approach encourages self-assessment, imparts information about the work world of tomorrow, and helps readers explore academic and career alternatives pertaining to their interests and the careers they wish to pursue, now and in the future. Exercises are designed to involve the reader in career decision making for the present and the future. New to this edition are case studies in every chapter, which bring the discussion into the real world of work. Chapter One begins by addressing some basic questions: How do people choose careers? Why do people work? What is a career? Why do I need to plan? The chapter explains the career choice process and personalizes it through six exercises designed to get readers started on their career journey. Chapter Two explores personal characteristics as they relate to career interests, values, aptitudes, and skills. The exercises involve self-assessment of these characteristics. Chapter Three enables students to identify, explore, and evaluate the various career options available to them and to consider how future trends might affect their career choices. The exercises help students narrow their options to general fields of interest and introduce informational interviewing to help them learn more about their choices from people working in those fields. Chapter Four examines various educational options and college curricula. A matrix relates more than 100 college majors to associated interests and aptitudes. Chapter Five pulls together the elements examined in previous chapters to formulate a perspective for decision making. A model of the decision-making process is suggested for students to use in examining their own decision-making style for everyday and important decisions alike. Chapter Six examines the psychological edge identified with effective workers. It discusses how to acquire the knowledge and behavior associated with effectiveness, detailing specific strategies such as communicating effectively and managing stress. Included is the topic of ethical behavior and making ethical choices. Chapters Seven and Eight leave behind the personal perspective of previous chapters and move on to the important tasks involved in the job search itself, encouraging students to take specific action steps each academic year to help them prepare for the job search later. Exercises in both chapters explore issues such as writing effective resumes and cover letters and interviewing for a job. Chapter Nine helps students to pinpoint where they are in the career decision-making process and offers three methods by which to summarize the learning and accomplishments they have acquired during the course of this journey. This is a preamble to the next steps toward building satisfying careers, whatever the future may bring. Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge Dr. Margie Bogenschutz, who provided helpful suggestions for the job-search part of this book. We also would like to thank all of the students who, in using this book, offered us valuable feedback about their diverse career planning needs. We have incorporated their suggestions in this new edition. We extend special thanks to Prentice Hall Editor Sande Johnson and Assistant Editor Cecilia Johnson, who guided us through the revision pr