Career Cruising – the kick start to your career development!

After working at Career Services for a few years, I know how important it is to start your career development with assessment. Self-exploration and assessment are critical first steps in finding the right career for you. Although we have a lot of great self-assessment resources for students at Career Services, I want to focus today on one of my favourites, Career Cruising.

Career Cruising is an online assessment tool that anyone can use to help them find some direction. When a student comes in and says that they don’t know which careers they should be considering, I know they are still in the assessment stage of career planning. There are so many helpful resources that Career Cruising offers within their online site. Below I have taken apart the different categories that the Matchmaker Assessment has. If you complete the Matchmaker Assessment you will be able to see all of these categories for each career result from the assessment.

At a Glance: This section gives you a brief description of what this job is, summarizing all the information in the further categories.

Suitable for You?: This section displays (based on the questions you answered) why it came up in your Matchmaker results. You can see why and why not this career would suit you.

Job Description: This section holds an in depth explanation of what this job is. If you are seriously considering that career, reading all of this will be very helpful.

Working Conditions: This section is important to look at so you can recognize what the working conditions are for the career you are investigating. For example it will talk about the hazards of positions, times that you work, etc.

Earnings: This section tells you how much you will make as salary according to Canadian stats.

Education: This section is very important to note so you can see if you are on the right educational track. In this section you can browse different schools throughout Canada that offer programs that would coincide with that specific career.

Sample Career Path: In this section you will see a lifetime career sample. Most careers are broken down into Beginner, Intermediate and Senior levels so you can see how your income and role will develop over time.

Related Careers: This section holds a list of other careers that relate to the one you are looking at.

Other Resources: This section has a list of other resources you can explore that go beyond the information on Career Cruising. These are great ways to learn more about careers.

My last bit of advice is to explore, explore, explore! Also, don’t be afraid to take the assessment more than once, we are constantly changing individuals. This website offers so much information for people on their career journey. You can access Career Cruising by going to careerzone.brocku.ca and signing in with your Brock student username and password. 

Alysha-Lynn Kooter

Lead Career Assisant

4th Year Intermediate/Senior Concurrent Education - Visual Arts Major