Career Exploration Links & Job Search Library Resources: Career Exploration Sites

The Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County provides Career Coach. This site includes a Career Assessment so you can learn about yourself and Career Coach will give you career suggestions based on your interests. You can also browse or search for careers and find relevant data on wages, employment, and the training you need. You can browse over 700 programs that lead to a career, and the site also has a Résumé Builder. There is also a section to help veterans find civilian careers related to their military occupation.

CareerOneStop describes itself as: A source for employment information and inspiration. A place to manage your career. A pathway to career success. Contains tools to help job seekers, students, businesses and career professionals. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The CareerOneStop Skills Matcher is a collection of 40 key workplace skills that you are asked to rate yourself on. CareerOneStop then shows you a range of career options that might be a good fit. You will find a surprising variety of careers that match your ratings. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

CareerOneStop has created approximately 520 career videos that describe typical work tasks and settings, education requirements, and helpful qualities for approximately 1,000 different occupations. (Some closely related occupations are grouped together so that a single video may profile more than one occupation.) Each career video is approximately 90 seconds in length. Spanish language translations are available. There are also ‘Career Cluster’ videos that show the relationship of groups of occupations to the types of organizations that employ them. A third group of videos on the CareerOneStop site are Skills and Abilities videos that illustrate some of the important skills and abilities needed in many different types of jobs.

Career Outlook articles provide data and information on a variety of topics—including occupations and industries, pay and benefits, and more. These articles are helpful for students, career counselors, jobseekers, and others planning careers. Career Outlook has four departments: 1.) Feature articles present an in-depth look at a range of career topics. 2.) You’re a what? explores unusual occupations through the work of someone in that occupation. 3.) Interview with a… describes, in Q & A format, a specific worker’s career path. 4.) Data on display is a graphic presentation of data on employment and other topics. Career Outlook supplements the Occupational Outlook Handbook and is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor

Map Your Career is designed to help you plan for your future career(s), with predictions for where the Seattle-King County job market will be in the next decade, both jobs and careers. Select a general category (construction, healthcare, information technology, manufacturing, maritime, professional/scientific/technical services, public sector, trade, and transportation) and the Career Map shows the kinds of jobs in that general category in order of earnings and education needed - read the Career Maps from the center out, or from left to right. The RESOURCES tab provides links to the Talent Pipeline (showing the supply and demand for workers, by general occupation) and more.

My Next Move helps job seekers focus in on a career they want, but perhaps have not thought of. You can begin by describing your dream career in a few words and then exploring those results (with links to job and education opportunities). There is also a list of over 900 career options for you to look at – select one of the 20 ‘occupational areas’ and view a list showing the kinds of jobs that work in that field (and a description of the responsibilities, prospects, and education needed – with links to job and education opportunities). There is also the O*NET Interest Profiler, answer questions about the type of work you might enjoy and they'll suggest careers that match your interests and training. My Next Move and the O*NET Interest Profiler are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration, and developed by the National Center for O*NET Development.

The O*NET® team has designed a set of self-directed career exploration/assessment tools to help workers consider and plan career options, preparation, and transitions more effectively. They also are designed for use by students who are exploring the school-to-work transition. The assessment instruments are grouped into two major families – the O*NET Interest Profiler and the O*NET Work Importance Locator. These instruments will help individuals identify their work-related interests and what they consider important on the job to explore occupations that relate most closely to those attributes. Users of the tools may link to the more than 950 occupations described by the O*NET database, as well as to occupational information in CareerOneStop. This allows individuals to make a seamless transition from assessing their interests and work values to matching their job skills with the requirements of occupations in their local labor market.

Career Bridge is Washington's one-stop source for career and education planning. Explore Careers--See how your talents align with a career by taking a quiz. View Job Trends--discover if a career is growing and how much it pays. Find Education--search nearly 6,000 education programs to find locations and costs, whether students got jobs, what industries they went to work in, and how much they were paid. (Free registration required.)

Explore different careers. Learn what people do, how much they earn, and how to prepare for a career. This is a database of occupations available in Washington State, for use by RTC students, faculty and staff. (RTC log-in needed. Also reachable through the RTC Database page: https://rtc.edu/online-databases#WOIS)