CareerQuest, a powerful tool provided by the New Zealand government on careers.govt.nz, is designed to help you navigate the world of work and discover career paths that align with your interests and skills. Whether you’re a student exploring future options, a graduate entering the job market, or someone considering a career change, CareerQuest offers valuable insights to guide your journey. This article will walk you through how to effectively use CareerQuest to make the most of your career exploration.
Filtering Your Career Options for Targeted Results
CareerQuest allows you to refine your job search using industry and qualification filters, making it easier to pinpoint career options that match your specific needs and aspirations.
Industry Filters: Sorting jobs by industry helps you explore specific sectors that pique your interest. Are you drawn to technology, healthcare, or perhaps the creative arts? Using industry filters lets you focus your job search and uncover a range of roles within those fields. This is particularly useful if you have a preferred area of work but are unsure of the specific job titles available.
Qualification Filters: Education plays a significant role in career pathways. CareerQuest’s qualification filters allow you to narrow down job suggestions based on the level of education required. If you’re aiming for a role that doesn’t require extensive university study, you can filter out jobs needing Master’s degrees or PhDs. Conversely, if you are planning further education, you can focus on careers that align with those higher qualifications. Understanding the New Zealand Qualifications Framework (NZQF) is beneficial here, as it provides a clear structure for understanding different levels of education and their relevance to various careers. By using these filters strategically, you can ensure that the job suggestions you receive are realistic and aligned with your current or planned educational path.
Exploring Career Ideas That Might Not Initially Appear
It’s important to remember that CareerQuest is a tool designed to suggest potential career paths based on your answers. Sometimes, a career you’ve considered might not appear in your initial results. Let’s explore why this might happen and how to investigate further.
Job Profile Availability: While CareerQuest has a comprehensive database, it’s possible that a very niche or newly emerging job role might not yet be included in their profiles. If you’re searching for something specific and it doesn’t appear, try using broader or related search terms. You might find similar roles that offer comparable skills and career satisfaction.
Answer Relevance: CareerQuest’s algorithm is designed to filter results based on your quiz responses. This means that if your answers indicate a lack of interest in certain aspects of a job, that job might be excluded from your results. For example, as the original article mentioned, if you express no interest in outdoor work, roles like “carpenter” might not appear, even if carpentry was a career you were initially considering. Carefully review your answers to see if any of them might be unintentionally filtering out careers you’re interested in.
Discussing Your Initial Ideas: Before you dive into CareerQuest, take some time to reflect on your own career ideas. What jobs have you considered? What are your interests and skills? After using CareerQuest, compare your initial ideas with the suggestions provided by the tool. This comparison can be insightful. If a job you were expecting isn’t there, delve deeper into the job profiles of the suggested roles and explore “similar jobs” sections. You might discover related careers you hadn’t previously considered that are actually a great fit.
Reviewing and Changing Your Responses for Different Outcomes
CareerQuest is interactive, and you’re not locked into your initial answers. The tool allows you to easily review and modify your responses to see how those changes affect your career suggestions.
Adjusting Your Quiz Answers: Look for the “view/change my answers” option within CareerQuest. This feature lets you go back through your quiz responses and make alterations. Experiment with changing answers, particularly those where you selected “neutral.” Sometimes, those neutral responses can be pivotal in shaping your results.
Moving from Neutral: Think critically about your neutral responses. Ask yourself: “If I had to choose, would I lean towards ‘interested’ or ‘uninterested’?” Pushing yourself to take a stance, even if it’s a slight lean, can refine your CareerQuest results and provide clearer direction. What factors led you to choose “neutral”? Exploring those reasons can reveal more about your preferences and help you make more decisive choices within the tool.
Restarting CareerQuest: If you want to start completely fresh, CareerQuest provides a “restart” link. This clears all your previous answers and allows you to take the quiz again from the beginning. This can be useful if you feel your initial answers weren’t truly reflective of your current thinking or if you want to explore different scenarios.
Creating a List of Your Favorite Career Options
As you explore the various job profiles suggested by CareerQuest, you’ll likely find some that particularly resonate with you. CareerQuest has a helpful feature to keep track of these: the “favorites” list.
Using the Heart Icon: Next to each job listed in your CareerQuest results, you’ll see a heart icon. Clicking this heart adds that job to your favorites list. This is a simple and effective way to curate a collection of career options that you want to explore further.
Centralized Favorites: The great thing about the favorites list on careers.govt.nz is that it’s centralized. If you use other tools on the website in addition to CareerQuest, all your favorited jobs from across the site will be gathered in one place. This makes it easy to review and compare your top choices, regardless of which tool you used to discover them.
Saving and Sharing Your Career Insights
Once you’ve used CareerQuest and identified some promising career paths, you can save and share your results, making it easier to reflect on your findings and discuss them with others.
Downloading and Emailing Results: CareerQuest allows you to download a PDF of your top 25 job results. You can also email these results to yourself or others. This PDF is a valuable resource for offline review and for sharing with career advisors, mentors, or family members who are supporting your career exploration.
Interactive PDF: The PDFs generated by CareerQuest are interactive. Within the PDF, you can click on each job title to be taken directly to the comprehensive job profile on careers.govt.nz. This provides instant access to detailed information about each role, including job descriptions, salary expectations, required skills, and career pathways.
Saving and Sharing Favorites: You can also save and share your list of favorite jobs. This is helpful for focusing on your top choices and for discussing them with others who are involved in your career journey.
Using CareerQuest Without an Account: CareerQuest is accessible even without creating an account or signing in to careers.govt.nz. However, to utilize the save and share features, you will need to be logged in. Creating an account is free and allows you to make the most of all the personalized features offered on careers.govt.nz.
CareerQuest is a valuable resource for anyone in New Zealand exploring career options. By understanding how to effectively filter results, explore different career paths, adjust your answers, utilize the favorites list, and save/share your findings, you can maximize the benefits of this government tool and take confident steps towards your ideal career.
