Resources for Career Counseling

• O*NET OnLine and Career OneStop are both maintained by the United States Department of Labor and provide self-assessment and job information. You can find resources there for:

• Connecting interests to careers (“Work Importance Locator”)

• Connecting skills to jobs (“Skills Search”)

• Job descriptions

• Job outlooks

• GetMyFuture, accessed through Career OneStop, provides several resources primarily for adolescents and young adults to learn about careers. It includes information on exploring education and training options, applying to college, writing a resume, gaining work experience, and obtaining and keeping a job. The GetMyFuture toolkit provides a convenient access point and description of many of the resources they offer.

• MyNextMove is another O*Net site; it provides more ways to research career possibilities. It includes tools for searching careers by keywords, browsing careers by industry, and answering questionnaires to get a sense of your interests.

• Wingspans (formerly “Inventing Heron”) is a great website of career inventories compiled and presented in interview and video formats by a team of journalists. Much of the content is geared toward adolescents and young adults becoming oriented to the working world. As such, it takes a wonderfully personal approach to career profiles and they provide a multitude of resources. Wingspans uses a subscription model in order to support access for increasing numbers of young people to become excited about thinking about their futures. Also be sure to check out their social media (Facebook, Twitter) for more thoughtful resources.

• Job Hunters’ Bible is a supplement to the book What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles.

• There are several brief interest inventories that are free of charge or quite inexpensive if you would like to use a basic online tool to begin to explore your potential career interests. The following are free of charge and may provide useful starting points for you:

  • The GetMyFuture Interest Assessment consists of 30 questions, and the respondent focuses on indicating their level of interest in each activity described. Like the GetMyFuture website itself, this is primarily built for adolescents and young adults. Results will include suggested occupations based on the responses given, as well as links to more extensive descriptions of each of those occupations.

  • The O*Net Interest Profiler consists of 60 questions (some of which overlap with the GetMyFuture Interest Assessment described above); again, the respondent indicates their level of interest in each activity described. Results provide a profile of the respondent as having the greatest interest in occupations that share certain characteristics. The site groups occupations by “Job Zones” according to the levels of education and training required, and users are encouraged to search occupations according to their own interests (as indicated by their profile results) together with their “Job Zones” as determined by their current or planned levels of education/training.

• Ask A Manager is an excellent resource for a wide variety of work-related questions and concerns. Longtime HR professional Alison Green provides excellent advice on cover letters, resumes, and job searches, and she also answers readers’ questions in one of the best workplace advice columns you’ll find. Use the search feature.

• Please click this text for a list of local emergency mental health resources available throughout the state of Maryland.