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Certain types of people match certain types of careers. Sometimes parents, friends or your community may try to push you towards a career that you know you're not right for. Sometimes your friends are all studying something – so you feel you should too. Other times you hear that you might get a bursary for a certain course and this makes you want to choose it. Be careful, as you will spend a large amount of your life working... and working in the wrong job can be stressful and unfulfilling.
Knowing what careers you really wouldn't like to do is VERY important too... Write down five careers you wouldn't like to do. Knowing what you don't want to do is just as important as knowing what you want to do. Perhaps you don't really like the idea of working with and caring for people, so a job in teaching, nursing or social work puts you off. Maybe you don't enjoy working with numbers, so careers in engineering or accounting seem unexciting.
Write down two careers you feel someone else would like you to do that you don't think are really right for you...
Think of the three school subjects you did well in or enjoyed. Write these down. These are strong areas for you and could be used in your future career. Was there a subject you wished you could have taken that was not offered by your school?
The Department of Higher Education and Training has a Career Advice Service where fully qualified Career Advisors provide career information, guidance and advice by telephone:
Call them on 086 999 0123
Website www.careerhelp.org.za
Email them on careerhelp@dhet.gov.za or callcentre@dhet.gov.za
OR communicate with them via Facebook at www.facebook.com/careerhelp
Which subjects were your least favourite?
When choosing your career, make sure your career does not need you to be good at the things you are not good at! After these seven steps, you’ve probably put in quite a lot of thought about the kind of person you are. It's so important to ‘match' who you naturally are to a career that is right for you. Continue to fill in the following quiz, which describes four different working personality types. Which one are you?
This next section of Self-Help Steps is about jobs that are out there. This is very important because if you don't know about different careers, you can’t make a well informed choice!
Knowing about careers
On a scale of 1 to 10, rate how much you know about what jobs are out there in the world of work. 1 means you feel you have little knowledge of what jobs exist and 10 means you feel you know quite a bit about the variety of careers there are to choose from.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
If you rated your knowledge as less than a 10, read on to build up your knowledge of careers and improve your score.
First things first: to get into a career, you usually need to study. Do you know the difference between NC(V), certificate, diploma and degree study? Do you know about distance learning, and part-time and full-time study options? If not, have a look at pages 256-257.
Okay, let's think about what jobs are out there. Have a look at the 'programme choice list' in this Handbook and read through the career directions. Are there any career directions there that you don't know about? Write these down. Then have a look through the relevant pages
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6.1. FIND OUT WHAT YOU'RE GOOD AT