Overview
Welcome to the CCDF Learning Centre’s Career Exploration and Decision-Making Course. We’re so happy that you’ve selected it as part of your learning plan and continuing professional development and are thrilled to bring you this course content.
Career development is the lifelong process of managing learning, work, and transitions in order to move toward a personally determined and evolving preferred future. In many ways, the work you do that’s focused on the career decision-making dimension is the heart and soul of career development.
Career decision-making focuses on helping people to know themselves, know the labour market and put it all together to make informed career decisions.
When we don’t have a clear and grounded sense of career direction, it’s easy to fall into learning or work that isn’t well aligned to who we are. It’s possible to train for something with almost no job openings. Or we might just spin, unsure where to even start. Without an informed sense of career direction, we risk experiencing disappointments, failures, or false starts.
On the other hand, when someone knows where they want to go in life, they’re way more likely to get there. When we connect with a sense of career direction that really reflects who we are and what we care about, we are more motivated, more engaged, more committed and determined to achieve our career goals. When our career direction is clear and compelling, we become much more motivated and focused learners and more satisfied and engaged workers. And when our career goals are also grounded in solid labour market research, nothing can hold us back.
Think about it:
Have you had a client totally sure they wanted a specific training course, only to find out later it wasn’t right for them at all?
Maybe you’ve worked with someone who just wanted a job but wasn’t self-aware enough to know what kind of work would suit their strengths, values, and preferences.
Perhaps you’ve worked with someone who knew exactly what kind of work they wanted but had no idea about the labour market realities of that work (working conditions, salary, openings, requirements, etc.) – so once they got out into the job market, they were shocked and disappointed.
And what about the person who just has no idea what they want. Maybe they’ve never worked and feel lost. Maybe they’ve had one job their whole life and now have to reinvent themselves and don’t know where to start.
All these people need to spend some time focusing on the career decision-making dimension. The work you do helping individuals to explore career options and make informed career decisions is the fuel that will feed their career success.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this 30-hour course, it will:
- Help you work with clients to explore their values, their personal characteristics and preferences, their abilities, their interests, the kinds of work that might be right for them.
Course Structure
This course will guide you step-by-step through the career decision-making process and give you practical tools and resources to support your work in this dimension. Apart from a bit of theoretical context at the beginning, the rest of the course will be a “how to” guide, walking through the steps of career decision-making one by one. A practical workbook will be provided as the main course resource. This workbook can be given in its entirety to a client, either supported by you or as a self-guided workbook. You can also break it up and give specific activities or tools to clients when they’re most timely. The bulk of the course content mirrors this workbook so, by the end of this course, you’ll be an expert in facilitating career decision-making and you’ll have all the resources you’ll need to do it well right at your fingertips.
- Career Exploration and Decision-Making
- Looking Inward: Know Yourself
- Looking Outward: Know the Labour Market
- Putting It All Together
The course assessment
- Part A:
- Part B: The second assessment is a 20 questions quiz on the content of the course. The course assessment format is based on true/false, yes/no and/or multiple-choice questions. A passing grade of at least 80% is required to receive the course certificate. You can try the assessment multiple times. Instructor support is available if needed.
