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Career Counseling & Assesment

Confused about your major or career path? Do you want to feel more confident in your choice of major or career? Do you know what career you want but you are not sure how to get there?

If you answer yes to any of these questions then perhaps you may benefit from career counseling. The goal of career counseling is to not only help you make the decisions you need to make now, but also to give you the knowledge and skills you need to make future career and life decisions. Your career development is a lifelong process. There are a number of factors that influence your career decision making process, including your interests, abilities, values, personality, background, and circumstances. Career counseling is a collaborative process that is designed to help you to know and understand yourself and the world of work in order to make career, educational, and life decisions. How do I get started?

At UTEP’s Counseling and Psychological Services, we will help you explore how your personality and learning style match up with various career and educational pathways in order to help you find the path that is best for you.  The first thing you will do to access these services is to call us at (915)747-5302 to schedule a career counseling appointment.  After this initial appointment your therapist will help you register to take the Myers-Briggs and Strong Interest Career assessments, which cost a total of $38.  You counselor will review your results and help you find the career path fits best for you based on the results from your career inventories/test and conversations with your counselor.  Additionally, your counselor may suggest you look at Choice360 to help you further plan for how to reach your desired career goals.

Career Assesments Used

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment, through a series of questions, helps you identify your natural preferences in four areas of personality:

• How do you direct and receive energy—by focusing on the outside world, interacting with people and taking action, or by focusing on your inner world and reflecting on ideas, memories, and experiences?
• How do you take in information—by focusing on what you perceive using your five senses or by seeing the big picture and looking for relationships and patterns?
• How do you decide and come to conclusions—by logically analyzing the situation or by considering what’s important to the people involved?
• How do you approach the outside world—in a planned, orderly way or a more flexible, spontaneous way?

Your natural preferences in these four areas sort you into one of 16 distinct MBTI personality types. Understanding these types gives you objective insight that you can use to enhance your professional and personal relationships, as well as your direction, focus, and choices. Additionally, your results will be compared with the O*NET system of occupational classification developed by the U.S. Department of Labor, to help identify careers that an individual with your personality type would likely find rewarding and enjoyable.

Strong Interest Inventory

The Strong Interest Inventory® assessment provides robust insight into a person’s interests, to help individuals to consider potential careers, their educational path and the world of work. Built on psychologist John Holland’s theory, it’s backed by more than 80 years of research into how people of similar interests are employed, and what motivates individuals in the workplace. It delivers effective and powerful results that contribute to your success.

The Strong Interest Inventory assessment helps individuals identify their work personality by exploring their interests in six broad areas: realistic, artistic, investigative, social, enterprising, and conventional (often referred to using the acronym RIASEC). ). It then breaks the RIASEC areas into 30 specific areas of interest that can be directly related to fields of study, careers, and leisure activities. In addition, it describes an individual’s personal style preferences in five areas: work style, learning environment, team orientation, leadership style, and risk taking. Depending on the report you choose, it ranks the individual’s top 5 or 10 most compatible occupations from a list of 260 specific jobs.

Choices360

Choices360 is a comprehensive career planning program that can help you make decisions about your educational and career goals. You can use Choices360 in English and/or Spanish to:

• Learn about your interests, skills and values by taking assessments
• Search for occupations using your assessment results and/or other desired characteristics
• Search for occupations by alphabetical listing
• Record the information you want to save in your Portfolio