When it comes to making careers decisions, a good place to start is understanding what is important to you.

Everyone has different priorities when it comes to choosing a career. Reflecting carefully on what is personally important to you (your values), what engages you (your interests), what you do well (your skills and strengths), and the type of person you are (your personality type) before making career decisions means you:

Make more informed career choices
Produce more credible, coherent and convincing applications and interview answers

The resources below will help you explore each of the aspects in more detail.

Strengths: our strengths are things that we are both good at and feel energised doing. Research shows that, when using our strengths, we're happier, more engaged, and more likely to achieve our goals. Knowing your strengths helps you to focus on the tasks you do well and enjoy, which can help you figure out which jobs or careers may be the best match for you.

The Jobmi website has a great tool to help you identify your strengths and match these to jobs. Sign in or register to get started.

Work values: these are personal ideals, motives, and beliefs that help you identify what’s most important in your professional career.

The Career Values exercise from The Careers Group can help you work out your top values, as well as aspects you want to avoid!

What am I like: understanding your personality, what drives and motivates you and when you feel most like yourself, can help you evaluate your different career options base on what will be the most fulfilling fit for you.

The What Am I Like resource from The Careers Group can you you reflect.

Personality: you can take also a personality test, which measures your preferences for dealing with and relating to people, processing information, making decisions and organising your life.

All of these can be useful to take into consideration when choosing a career.

Skills: taking a skills audit to reflect on which skills you perform well in and you enjoy using can give you some good clues about what to look out for when evaluating job options.

You can also book a careers appointment to explore your options with a Careers Consultant and help figure out which might be the best career or job for you by helping you identify your skills, interests and values and supporting you to generate career ideas.