+CHAPTER ONE

Choosing Your Career

+OBJECTIVES

Discuss career and job trends and describe sources of job information.

Complete a job analysis form, listing the positive and negative features of potential career choices.

Describe the techniques for coping with change.

Explain changing career patterns in a world economy and the need for job networking.

+CAREERS OF THE FUTURE

Technology creates newer, better, and faster ways of getting things done. Technology is a general term for advances resulting from improvements in work methods that increase productivity of people and machines.

Productivity, the value of a completed product in relation to its cost, must increase for a company to stay competitive.

+Major Occupational Groups

In the 1900’s, farmers comprised more than one-third of the total workforce. Today they make up less then three percent.

Today the largest career group is the one dealing with information and technology.

The second largest career group is professions.

Service jobs are a large and growing sector of the market.

+Job Titles and Descriptions

Dictionary of Occupational Titles

Occupational Outlook Handbook

Monthly Labor Review

All Publications can be found in a Library

+JOB ANALYSIS

Job Analysis shows the positive and negative attributes of a given career choice.

+Positive Features

Salary: The amount of monthly or annual pay for which you are hired.

Benefits: Include sick pay, vacation time, profit-sharing plans, health insurance and other company-provided supplements to income.

Promotion: The ability to advance, to accept more responsibilities, and eventually to work your way up to higher positions.

+Negative Features

Employee Expenses: include any costs to be paid by the employee that are not reimbursed by the employer.

Work characteristics: such as routine or changing task, working alone or with people, job pressures, time between breaks, supervisory relationships, number of employees.

+Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur: someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risk of a business or enterprise.

+COPING WITH CHANGE

Read Widely

Be a Lifetime Learner

Take Classes

Complete a Self-Assessment

+Read Widely

Read material in your area of work.

Read the newspaper and listen to the news.

+Be a lifetime Learner

Ask questions

Talk to people in your profession

Join professional groups and organizations

+Take Classes

Upgrading: advancing to a higher level of skill to increase your usefulness to an employer.

Retaining: the learning of new and different skills so that an employee can retain the same level of employability.

Advanced degrees: obtained through specialized, intensive post-baccalaureate programs that prepare the recipients for higher level degrees.

+Complete a Self-Assessment

College placement center: offers advice and counseling.

Self-assessment inventory: list your strengths and weaknesses.

 

+CHANGING CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Long-Term Planning

A World Economy

Networking

+Long-Term Planning

Career plans must span several decades and must be as broad, diversifies, and open to the opportunities and challenges of the future as possible.

+A World Economy

We need to be aware of what is happening in the world.

Third World Country: are undeveloped and underdeveloped nations.

+Networking

Networks: communication lines established for people to talk to each other and share information.