Career Exploration & Investigation

In Career Exploration & Investigation we determine how your personality, skills, values and interests can guide you through a career transition and lift the fog of an uncertain path. The challenges of navigating a meaningful, fulfilling professional path can feel overwhelming, leaving us to feel "stuck" or caught in a vicious cycle, often affecting our sense of balance, physical and emotional health and personal relationships.

When navigating strategic career moves, it's can help to give yourself time and space to consider all of your options with a career professional to provide reflection, accountability, resources and support. We'll encourage you to narrow your potential career opportunities to one specific profession that you can successfully target.

Self-Exploration

Starting with a self-analysis phase, we'll ask you to create a profile of your ideal employer and spend time finding clarity about the type of work and settings that stir not just your passions but also build long-term engagement and connection.

The heart of this phase encourages you to complete a systematic reflection of yourself as a professional. We'll show you how to use websites to learn about expectations, salary and educational requirements. As you identify what you are looking for in a new career based on key interests, personality type, values, and skills, we will introduce tools to help you further narrow down your options to isolate a single career path that satisfies your needs for self-expression, contribution, connection and professional mastery.

Since few of us do great things on entirely on our own, we also encourage you to reach out to key sources of moral support during the stress of a career change while also building robust internal resources.

Basic Message

While web research is crucial, talking to people is the heart of career investigation. We love connecting people and relish helping you locate professionals for informational interviews and appropriate professionals groups for further exploration.

As the fog that may be obscuring your career path starts to lift, we'll help you distill your findings into a basic message -- much like an elevator pitch or elevator speech. This basic message provides a memorable way to describe what you are looking for seeking when networking and conducting informational interviews.

Resumes, Cover Letters, and LinkedIn

As your next steps become clearer, we will help you craft resumes and cover letters that represents you well, careful to tailor them for specific job openings and "applicant scanning systems" that may be searching for specific keywords. If appropriate to your chosen profession, we can support you in creating a dynamic LinkedIn profile, coaching you to use this tool to its full potential when continuing to network and familiarize yourself with a new field.

Job Search

In just the last 5 years the way we search for jobs has shifted tremendously, requiring us more than ever to embrace technology and social media in ways that force us out of our comfort zone. Patience and humor, we've decided, are the best guideposts on his challenging phase of Career Exploration & Investigation, and we'll bring you up to speed, if necessary, on this tricky new landscape while helping you maintain a sense of equilibrium and hopefulness.

Interview & Confidence Coaching

Once the job offers start pouring in, we can help you successfully land the job with interview preparation and, if necessary, confidence coaching. We'll counsel you not only on what to say but coach you through the performance aspects of interviewing. We can even offer video services to help you improve your interview performance and prepare for online interviews and online applications.

Entrepreneurial Startup Support

If entrepreneurism is on your horizon, we'll help you navigate that option as well. Increasingly, it is more common that people start their businesses as side hustles. If this is the route you choose, we can support you as you plan a business while pursuing a job search for part-time or full-time work. If you would rather commit entirely to starting a business, we can assist you with branding, marketing, business planning and networking support.

Career Assessment Tests

We use Career Assessment Tests as one of many tools to move you through the Self-Assessment phase. We combine informal discussion with other exercises we have designed to help you get the most out of these and other career assessments and successfully determine a long-lasting career strategy.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

MBTI is a popular, time-tested tool to identify your psychological type preference. By identifying one of the possible 16 profiles you match, we also examine career choices that are often satisfying for your personality type. If you already know your Myers Briggs (or don't agree with the results), we can offer a more nuanced version called the Type II that offers an in-depth analysis of each facet of your personality type.

Strong Interest Inventory

The Strong Interest Inventory is a computer-based career planning tool that compares your answers with the responses of thousands of successful professionals in hundreds of careers. The resulting report is comprehensive and includes the top 10 occupations that match your interests as well as a 3-letter code you can use in the O*NET database, a federal career website that is continuously updated and provides exhaustive information about thousands of job positions.

Colorful Values Sort

Kristin Schuchman created this tool to expand on the idea of sorting values by creating this color-coded values tool to provides clarity about the deeper influences that are guiding your career search.

SkillScan

SkillScan is an interactive card sort to help identify natural strengths and key transferable skills. As a result, we will identify your top five skills, such as Coaching, Data Analysis, and Writing, as areas to develop further.

Clifton Strengthsfinder.

This online assessment identifies your top five talents to further hone into career strengths. Tom Rath developed this assessment based on the works of Dr. Donald Clifton, the father of strength psychology. The team at Gallup surveyed 10 million people and identified 34 positive talents correlated with productive, engaging work.

Career Counseling Packages

4-Session "Brass Tacks" Package: $500

Can include the following topics tailored to your needs: resume and cover letter review, LinkedIn review, interview practice and job search strategy. Also includes one formal assessment (choose among the Myers Briggs, Myers Briggs Step II, Strong Inventory and Clifton Strengthsfinder).

7-Session Career Transition Package: $825

Designed for people who are uncertain about their career path and willing to take a deeper dive to find work that is more fulfilling. Includes 3 (three) sessions to assess your interests, skills, values, and your ideal employer with the goal of determining at two focused career options and 4 (four) final sessions to prepare you for your next career steps. If you decide to work for someone else, we''ll work on your resume and review cover letter writing, interview prep and LinkedIn. If you decide to start a business, we'll begin the process of getting your business started with a 3-page business plan, a marketing plan and a networking strategy. Additionally, this package includes the Career Transition Workbook and two formal career assessments (choose among the Myers Briggs, Myers Briggs Step II, Strong Inventory and Clifton Strengthsfinder).

* Sliding scale available for new college graduates. Please feel free to inquire.

Decide at the end of one session if one of the packages is right for you. Contact us if you’d like to talk more about how our services can help you.

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