Top 4 Free Career Development Downloads from Career Key and Career Key Canada

Looking for free, high quality career development resources for yourself or a group?  This is the first in a 4 part series highlighting Career Key's most popular, low-cost downloads and articles. Some you may already know about - others may be new to you. First, a little Q & A:

Why do we do we charge so little? We want to make professional-quality career development available to everyone. Reading Career Key author Lawrence K. Jones's personal story, our mission, and our donations to charity give a little context.

Why isn’t everything free, like The Career Key test, Career Key Canada test, and Match Up! to College Majors? We need to support our websites and we decided:

• not to show ads,
• not to mine/sell your personal data (via registration requirement), and
• to subsidize and offer counselors & non-profits low cost group discounts for scientifically valid career assessments and ePublications.

Crazy? Maybe. But retiring in the Bahamas was never our goal...

Here are Career Key and Career Key Canada’s websites’ top 4 most popular free downloads - and where you can find them. Please link to them (without framing) and share the links with others!

1.  “Foundation Skills - Job Skills all Workers Need for the 21st Century”
Foundation Job Skills at The Career Key website
Foundation Job Skills at The Career Key Canada website
Good for: individuals, discussion groups, workshops, classrooms
PDF, free for non-commercial use.  If you want to purchase a license to make copies (and help support us), go to our eBookstore and pay only $5.95 to make 25 copies of “Advice and Actions for Making Smart Career Decisions” - a 25 page collection of our most popular web articles, including this “Foundation Skills” handout.


2.  Choosing a College Major Based on Your Personality: What does the research say? (Canadian version)Describes Holland's Theory of Career Choice, the supporting research for using it to choose a college major, and 5 strategies for making a good college major match.
Good for: students, parents, counselors and educators
Find the article here:
Choosing a College Major at The Career Key website
Choosing a College Major in Canada at The Career Key Canada website

3.  Choosing a Career Cluster, Field, or Pathways?  Download our free, Career Key Career Clusters and Career Pathways Map. You can use it to match your Holland personality with Career Clusters and Pathways.
Good for: students, parents, school counselors, and educators
Find the PDF and the "Choose a Career Cluster, Field or Pathway" article at The Career Key website

4.  Guide to Using The Career Key to Meet the ASCA (American School Counselors Association) National Model Competencies
Good for: school counselors interested in affordable ways to fulfill student competencies in career development (part of the ASCA National Model).
Find the article at The Career Key website
Find the article at The Career Key Canada website

Next post.... Our top free Holland personality match website articles...

New Career Information Resource - InsideJobs.com

I recently found a new career information resource called InsideJobs “Career Day Every Day” that I would recommend.  After matching your personality to careers using The Career Key, you can supplement the recommended activities in our articles “Learn More About Occupations” and “Learn More About the Jobs that Interest Me” by looking at career information at the InsideJobs website. 

What I like about it is that in addition to offering easy to read job descriptions, InsideJobs gathers quality career information in one spot.  For example, they use government sources like the Occupational Outlook Handbook and the O*NET, as well as Web resources like Wikipedia.  They also add interactive media like informational interviews from YouTube.

While I did not read all the job descriptions, the ones I read were informative and well-balanced.  Some career information resources are, in my opinion, too simplistic or gloss over the "real world" aspects of an occupation - but I did not find that true of InsideJobs' listings.

I would be cautious about taking at face value online information about salary and working conditions (including career information Career Key provides).  There is no substitute for conducting informational interviews with regional people working in that job.  For example, for InsideJobs' description for "Public Defender", typical salary is listed as $113K and the schedule as Monday through Friday.  That is a little optimistic (on both counts) for many lawyers, including public defenders on contract with a government agency.   But the point is to help you learn about a variety of career options and this website definitely succeeds.  And there is also some limitation to how any website can describe work schedules - basically, anyone "salaried" has the potential to work well over 40 hours a week (Monday through weekend) - some jobs (any lawyers) work more than others.

It’s a challenge to make career information fun and substantive at the same time - and I like how InsideJobs does that.

As always, our recommendations are just that - no affiliate links, etc.

Pessimism, Choosing or Changing Careers, and Job Satisfaction

What expectations do you have in choosing a particular career, changing careers, or in life, for that matter? Alain de Botton's video about pessimism may put things in perspective - and make you more cheerful.  De Botton is a writer/public speaker who has been described as a "philosopher of everyday life." In this video, he talks about the over-romanticizing of work (and life) and the pitfalls of viewing everything through an optimistic lens.

Our 6 Principles of the Free Agent Worker complement some of his ideas in that we clearly say, "work is labor for pay."  Not very romantic, but sometimes you need to be realistic about what work truly is to achieve greater job satisfaction. Do you agree?


Alain de Botton - On Pessimism from The School of Life on Vimeo.

3 Creative Approaches to Gathering Career Option Information

With such poor or varying quality career information found online, it’s important to adopt a creative approach online. Here are 3 approaches to getting more useful, reliable & locally relevant information about the career options that interest you.

Listening to a public radio show this morning, I heard about the future of nursing. The pros and cons of associate degrees vs. bachelor’s & higher degrees in nursing was one topic. They had great information that I would definitely pass on to someone considering a nursing career.

How can you find information like this? Many might suggest Google “nursing” or “nursing career” but the career information on the web can be so poor, biased or locally irrelevant that it’s often best to try a different approach.

That’s true, especially in highly regulated careers that put you into close contact with other people & children like nursing, social work, fire fighting, teaching, etc. State and provincial governments are likely to have different requirements so where you intend to work is a big factor in your research.

Start first with our basic tips in “Learn About Occupations” and “Learn About the Jobs That Interest Me.”

Next, try these creative approaches (I used nursing as an example): 

1. Find Hot Topics
Find out the “hot topics” in a career field. Are you interested in learning about some of them - which ones and why? Ask yourself, what do my topic interests tell me about what part of this field might fit me best?
(Nursing examples) Healthcare reform, long term care, child nutrition, infection reduction in big hospitals, your state or province’s current issues with changes in government funding.

Find hot topics through informational interviews, subscribing to newsfeeds, social media, and Step #2 below.

2. Make Contact with Policy Making Organizations & Non-Profits
Look up the local and national policy makers & nonprofits related to a career field that interests you. Join up with them on social media and learn their language.  What are they talking about? What problems need to be solved?  Want to be part of the answer?

To find national organizations related to a career field (it's quicker than using a search engine), find the career's listing in the Occupational Outlook Handbook and click on "Sources of additional information". For local groups, do an Internet search using your state/city and the career field.  Like "Washington state" nursing.

3. Go Off the Reservation
Are there career options within a field that complement your other strongest Holland personality types you haven’t considered or know little about?

Don’t Limit Your Career Exploration to the “Nurse” Job Title
Average grades in biology, intimidated by nursing curriculum, don’t like needles, but still interested in nursing & health care? You can still work with nurses or in the health care industry (and with other Investigative personality types) without taking heavier science courses - if you truly don’t think you’re cut out for it. 

What about:

• getting involved in financial aspects of health care (If you’re also strong in Enterprising or Conventional)?
• lobbying local, state, or federal government on behalf of nurses? 
• Working for a union that represents nurses?
• Starting a business that helps improve nurses' and patients' lives?

These are all jobs that can pay well, where you work with the nursing community, but do not have to have strong science schooling.

Just to show how one thing leads to another...
Just using this Nursing radio show as an example, I looked up one of the presenters listed on the radio show website, who works for the Washington Center for Nursing.  They have a whole section describing Nursing Education in Washington. This section leads to other valuable information:

“You have various options to develop your career as a nurse. Which path you choose will depend on a combination of factors, including your location (or ability to relocate), which career you are planning (link to Nursing Practice - Roles in Nursing), your financial means, acceptance into a nursing program, and many others.”

That same webpage they even have a free PDF of “questions to ask when investigating nursing schools”.

One Last Career Information Recommendation: look for unbiased, non-commercial sources for career information. Know your source.  For example, be a skeptic when a school gives you information about a career (salary, job requirements, job outlook) while marketing itself as a direct route for a popular career area (nursing, construction, web designer...) Make sure you double check claims of strong need for certain jobs in your area.  Nonprofits have their biases too.

Missing Piece in College Retention Improvement Efforts

Significantly improving college retention is only possible when state and national policymakers consider increasing the number of students who choose a college major that fits their personality. Unfortunately, states and the federal government are making this personality-major match more difficult to achieve. Learn more by visiting our new "College Retention, Completion, and Graduation" article at The Career Key website.

UPDATE: our PRWEB college completion press release went out today (March 9, 2011).

Click here to download the new PDF report, "Key Piece in College Completion Missing: Personality Major Match," by Career Key author, Lawrence K. Jones, Ph.D., NCC.

For a long time, Dr. Jones has been active in the professional career development community, advocating for the use of scientifically valid assessments in career guidance. To download reprints of his articles on this issue published by the National Career Development Association and the American School Counselor Association, please visit our Press Room and click on the "Articles" section.

New College Majors E-Book: "Match Up! Your Personality to College Majors 2011"

Our new "Match Up! Your Personality to College Majors" e-book launched today is the first to show students and adults in a career change all college majors in the U.S. and Canada matching their Holland personality types. Career Key author Lawrence K. Jones, Ph.D., NCC and I coauthored the book.

Choose a college major based on your personality and interests.

That's what the research indicates. Major studies over the past ten years show that with a good match you are likely to,

• Earn higher grades,
• Stick with your choice of major through graduation,
• Graduate on time, and
• Be more satisfied and successful in your career.
  

Match Up! Your Personality to College Majors is the first and only book to take advantage of this research. It helps students and adults returning to school. It,

• Shows you college majors (and occupations) that fit your personality;
• Lists and describes all 1,400+ college majors and programs of study found in colleges and community colleges in the U.S. and Canada (with related jobs);
• Organizes them by Holland personality type, and
• Links you to the colleges that offer them.

Visit The Career Key and The Career Key Canada websites, and today's press release for more information.

SPECIAL LAUNCH PROMOTION: the first 20 people to "Like" The Career Key on Facebook* (or already Like us) and purchase (or have purchased in the past) The Career Key test, will receive the Match Up! e-book free of charge (a $14.95 value when purchased by itself).  Just send me an email with your test order # (U__) and I'll email you the book! My email is julietjones at careerkey.org.
*If you don't have a Facebook account (and don't want one), sign up instead as a Feedblitz email subscriber at the top of this blog.

We think once you've seen Match Up, you'll want to recommend and tell others about it. In addition to our reliance on real science and best-practices, remember that we are ad-free and have a 10% sales donation policy - so you can feel good about referring others to us.

Career Key Blog Featured on Career Digital List of Career Blogs

Thank you to Career Digital for inviting The Career Key Blog to join their rank of featured career blogs! Career Digital pulls together career and job search related news from the top career blogs. To try it out, you'll see in the righthand column of our blog a Career Digital button.  Click on it or on any of the topics listed and you can explore what they offer.