Your ‘career drivers’ reflect your values, motivations and work preferences. These are rooted in your underlying beliefs about what is most important and often unconsciously guide your decisions. Because you do not need to apply them consciously, they can be difficult to identify. Nonetheless, they are likely to have underpinned your choices and enjoyment of the things you have done, and will continue to be important for your satisfaction and successes in future, and it can be empowering to understand:
- what you enjoy doing most;
- what helps you to succeed and to feel successful; and
- why you choose to do something and also what keeps you on track and motivated to see it through to the end.
Career Weaver: Our free web-based app to help you explore your personal work-drivers
The Careers Service has created Career Weaver, a novel web-based app to help stimulate reflection on these keys for your career success and happiness. There are a dozen short exercises, which provide a language and a varied range of approaches to help you explore, identify and articulate your career drivers, skills and strengths. Most exercises need only 5-10 minutes work before the user is reflecting on ideas and content they have created.
Career Weaver provides a first introduction to this kind of reflective work and users are not expected to complete every exercise. We encourage everyone to explore the different options to find exercises that fit with how they like to work, or which use a language and approach that helps them find insights and generate direction in their thinking. More information is provided in our briefing on Career Weaver, and the two sections below offer a short introduction to the language surrounding ‘career drivers’ and ‘skills and strengths’.
Career Weaver is accessed by staff and students using their SSO, and alumni can open an account through their CareerConnect account by sending the Careers Service a request via the ‘queries tab’ in CareerConnect.
For anyone wishing to dive deeper, there are many tools developed by external organisations to choose from. Most of these use only one specific approach or lens, and Career Weaver may give you insights about the kind of approach that will be most useful for you. The External Resources section (below) offers suggestions including the following:
- Personality questionnaires, which can quickly provide you with insights into your work preferences. Many also make suggestions about which careers might be a good fit with your personality profile. Examples include the short free personality-based tools on Prospects and TargetJobs (graduate careers websites); FindMyWhy; the DISC profile and Myers Briggs Type Indicator assessments are both used by the Careers Service; and some students may have completed a Morrisby profile while at school.
- Values or Strengths based tools that adopt a single lens to drive reflection, understanding and career (and life!) planning, including the Values into Action website, and the Cappfinity Strengths Profile.
- Creative Games, Tools and Questions found both in the Career Weaver exercises and in self-directed career-planning books, such as What Color is your Parachute? and The Squiggly Career.