Find career information

Making effective career decisions includes having enough relevant and reliable information available, combined with your ability to integrate the information with what you know about yourself, your career vision and goals. Your career research will connect you to others who will help you to:

• answer the questions you have about your career choice;
• learn more about specific occupations and their requirements;
• plan your studies linked to your career;
• expand your understanding of the opportunities related to your career vision;
• identify “hidden” career paths that you did not think of previously; and
• think about how you could plan to pursue specific opportunities.

Before you start with your exploration

Before you start with any career- and study option exploration, you need to understand what you need. What are you not sure about? What questions do you still have to enable you to make a career decision?

Keep track of your information

As you search, keep a record of the information you find and reminders to follow up on certain information. You also need to be aware that you need to make decisions at some stage. If you find that you are gathering a lot of information but you still find it hard to make a decision, you could contact a counsellor to talk about your choice.

Learn how to evaluate information

You must be able to evaluate the information you find online. Use the following questions to help you evaluate the information:

• Who wrote the information (look at the domain name - is it educational (.edu, .ac.za) or commercial (.com) or government (.gov, .gov.za) or nonprofit (.org, .org.za)?
• Try to find information under headings like “About us” or “Bibliography” to verify the author(s), when the page was last updated and what the author’s credentials are.
• Check for further links - what does this page link to? Does the author say where he or she got the information for this site?
• Check the purpose of the page: is it to provide information, to sell or convince, to share, or even to be humorous?

Where do you start?

There is a wide range of sources you can use to find career information.

1. Listen to this conversation about doing career research.
2. Read this overview of career research.
3. Download the Career Research brochure to keep track of your research.
4. Use the following resources to help you to gather information about your options: