How to find your career path, Me pēhea te kimi i tō huarahi aramahi

Whether you’re choosing a career, looking for mahi or making a career change, it’s important to think about and know your values, skills and interests.

Getting to know yourself will help you to make more confident decisions about your career path.

Take your time to explore your values, skills and interests.

Write down your thoughts or use our worksheets to record your answers. You might want to check them when you make a career decision.

Knowing your values can help you choose a career path that fits with what’s important to you.

Know your values

You can use the ‘What do I value in my work’ worksheet to explore your values.

It’s important to know what your skills are, for example, communication and listening skills. Find examples of how and where you’ve used your skills so you can describe them in your CV and to employers.

Know your skills

Skills employers are looking for

You can use the ‘Figure out your skills’ worksheet to identify your skills and describe how and where you’ve used them.

You can do the Interest quiz to learn about your interests and find out what career ideas might fit them.

Interest quiz

Next, find out more about what you could do and how you could do it.

Your options include:

• go straight into work
• earn while you learn, for example, with an apprenticeship, cadetship or the Defence Force
• study or train somewhere, like at a wānanga, university or polytechnic.

You can find out more about these options by doing some research.

About apprenticeships

Types of study and training providers

It’s important to think about your values, skills and interests when exploring career ideas.

If you’ve done the Interest quiz, choose some possible career ideas from your results and use the ‘Compare your career ideas’ worksheet to see how they fit with what’s important to you.

Explore career ideas

Take a moment to reflect. Do your possible career ideas fit with who you are as a person?

If the answer is yes, ka pai. You’re ready to make a decision.

Take your time to research each career idea that you’re interested in before deciding on your career path.

Use the ‘Decide on your career’ worksheet to research your career ideas. You’ll get an idea of what you would do in the job and how easy it is to find work in that industry.

To help you decide on your career ideas you could also write down the pros and cons for each.

A pro is anything you like about the career idea. For example:

• there are lots of job ads for this type of work
• it fits with your interests.

A con is anything you don’t like about the career idea. For example:

• you would have to work by yourself
• you would have to work shifts sometimes.

Most career ideas have a mix of pros and cons. Knowing the cons will help you figure out a way around them.

Working through this process will help you decide which career path is best for you.

Chosen your top career idea? It’s time to take action by planning for study and training or preparing for work.

Once you’ve decided on a career path you can plan for your study and training and find out more about study options, accommodation and costs.

You can use the ‘Plan your study and training’ worksheet to explore options. Share your plan with whānau or a career adviser. Ask them to suggest things you might have missed and add them to your plan.

Note important dates for things like applications and enrolments. Put them in a calendar and set yourself mini-deadlines to make sure you get everything ready in time.

If you’ve decided to go straight into work you can prepare for finding a job by getting your CV ready.

Add examples of your skills to your CV. If you don’t have a CV, you can use our CV examples and templates to create one.

How to look for a job
How to write a CV