In this article, I’m offering some tips on how you can match your strengths and interests with careers that are a good fit for you.
How to Match Your Strengths to a Future Career
Identifying your strengths and interests is an exciting first step. You’ve taken time to reflect, experimented with volunteer opportunities, and built a deeper level of self-awareness—but what comes next? Now it’s time to connect those insights to potential career paths. The good news: there are several reliable tools that can help you explore possibilities with confidence.
Here are three resources you can use to start aligning your strengths and interests with potential career paths
1. Use Labour Market Tools to Explore Options
Government labour market tools offer trustworthy, up-to-date information about a wide range of careers.
O*NET Online, created by the U.S. Department of Labor, is a helpful tool that lets you explore careers based on your strengths, abilities, personality traits, and interests. Each career profile shows what a typical day looks like, the skills you’ll need, and the education or training required. This makes it easier to see which careers match what you enjoy and what you’re good at.
Once you’ve found a few careers that interest you, you can use the Government of Canada’s Job Bank Labour Market Tool to get information specific to where you live. Job Bank shares details about education options, job demand, salary ranges, and key skills for each career. This is useful because it helps you choose career paths that are in demand and offer good opportunities in the future.
2. Take a Career Assessment
The Strong Interest Inventory (SII) is a widely used career assessment that helps students understand how their personal interests connect to potential career paths.
The assessment can help you discover roles you may have never considered while giving you insight into the work environments you may enjoy most, such as artistic, investigative, social, or hands-on settings.
Because the SII includes information about education and training requirements, it helps you understand the pathways associated with your strongest career matches. This can make course selection and post-secondary planning more focused and intentional. You can complete the assessment online at theassessmentsite.com
3. Informational Interviews
Once you’ve picked a few careers that match your interests and strengths, you can set up informational interviews with people working in those fields. These conversations give you a real look at what the job is like, the education or training you need, and the kinds of companies or organisations where people in that career work.
Here are some questions you might want to ask:
- What is a typical workday like for you, and what are your working conditions like?
- What are the most rewarding/challenging things about your job?
- What kind of education and training did you receive to enter this field?
- What advice do you have for a student who is looking to enter this field?
I Know Which Career I Want—Now What?
After using career assessments, labour market tools, and informational interviews to choose a career path, you can start exploring education programs that will help you get there. Some education pathways are linear, meaning they lead directly to a specific career – for example, earning an engineering degree to become a licensed engineer. Other pathways are non-linear, such as a business degree, which can open the door to many different roles in areas like project management, operations, consulting, and more within the corporate sector.
The key takeaway is that understanding your career goals can help you choose the right education path, whether it’s a direct route or one that keeps multiple options open.
Explore at Your Own Pace
Remember that exploring career options is a journey, not a race. It’s perfectly okay to take your time, reflect on your experiences, and use as many tools and resources as you need. Everyone makes decisions differently, and that individuality is part of what makes us unique.
Each step you take brings you closer to choosing an option that truly fits your interests, strengths, and goals.
Additional Resources
What Color Is Your Parachute? For Teens – Carol Christen
A career exploration and planning book aimed at teenagers and young adults to help them discover interests, set goals, and plan jobs/education after high school.
parachute4teens.org
A website associated with the book What Color Is Your Parachute? for Teens by Carol Christen. It offers some free downloadable career exploration resources (like worksheets and job lists) that can help teens with career planning.
If you think you might benefit from support as you match your strengths to potential career options, feel free to reach out to me through Transforming Emotions. With more than a decade of experience helping people choose the right academic programs and careers for them, I’d love to support you in navigating this exciting stage of life with more clarity and confidence. Book your free consultation now.
