The Career Decision-Making Process

Selecting a career is not an isolated, one-time event. It is a work in progress. This is true whether you are a brand new graduate, a mid-life career changer, or someone approaching retirement. Good career decision-making is based on a five-step process, which can be learned and utilized over your lifetime. These steps include:

• Step 1: Learning about Yourself (Self-Assessment)
  
• Step 2: Exploring and Researching Careers
  
• Step 3: Making Decisions
  
• Step 4: Setting Goals
  
• Step 5: Conducting an Effective Job Search

All of these steps are important, but perhaps the key to making good career decisions rests most firmly on step one: getting to know yourself. Understanding who you are, what you like and dislike, what motivates and challenges you, and what is frustrating to you, will lead you toward some occupations and away from others.

The MCC Career Counselors are experienced in helping students and alumni assess their skills, interests, work values, and personality preferences. Here are some of the ways to begin the self-assessment process.

• Individual meetings with a career counselor 
                                            
• Completing the Harrington-O’Shea Interest Inventory, a pencil and paper assessment which helps you match your interests to a broad range of occupational listings and details information about educational requirements and job outlook.                                                                 
• Completing the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator which focuses on assessing your natural personality preferences—the way you interact with the world, take in and process information and make decisions and relating them to the world of work.
                                                         
• Participating in career related classroom presentations and attending special career panels composed of working professionals who share information about their specific career fields.