There are a lot of websites that talk about choosing a college major and tell you what to major in. But The Career Key is the only website to offer majors advice based on solid science and independent research proven to lead to a successful education decision. We just launched the most comprehensive resource out there – and it’s affordable and easy to use.

Why does The Career Key offer the best way to choose a college major or post secondary program? Unlike other approaches it:

1. Uses a scientifically valid career test to match your interests and personality with majors and training programs;
2. Offers you the most education choices (all of the 1,400+ college majors and training programs listed by the U.S. and Canadian governments);
3. Shows you careers related to educational programs that match your personality;
4. Shows you accurate, comprehensive, up to date information about each career;
5. Organizes all the programs and careers in a unique way developed by recognized vocational expert Dr. Lawrence K. Jones that is easy to explore; and
6. Links you to a description of each major and program that interests you.
7. All this information only costs $14.50 when you purchase the eBook, The Education Key: Choosing the Right College Major, Training, or Instructional Program, and The Career Key test together. And we offer a special, affordable group discount for both.

I couldn’t resist posting this photo of Career Key’s author, Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, relying on his Realistic interests to keep his house ready for the winter elements. You architecture buffs out there will recognize the “Mansard” roof.

He’s written before about his unusual combination of Realistic and Social Holland personality types.

To oversimplify, liking to work with tools and with people is an unusual combination. Are you an unusual combination?

If your highest score is in the Realistic personality type, you might be interested in my latest blog series on job outlook by personality type. I blogged about Realistic job outlook last week….

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

 This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Many people are now considering whether to attend graduate school – recent college grads facing a poor job market, people considering a career change or upgrade, and unemployed B.A. holders looking for something to tide them over until the recession ends. If you do it, make sure you have a clear, well researched career goal in mind for how to use it.

In the early 90s, I was in the first category – a college grad facing a job market where it seemed like a Liberal Arts B.A. was no better than a high school diploma for getting a good paying job. But I had a clear career goal – being a labor or maritime lawyer. I took several valid interest inventories like The Career Key, worked as a clerk in a law office during college, did informational interviews with other lawyers – to learn more about it and to be sure it was right for me. And it was – for 10+ years – I still work at a legal clinic.

I came across a great “pros and cons” discussion that you should read if you are thinking of going to graduate school. “What is a Masters Degree Worth” is a June 30 NYT blog panel discussion, with more links to other resources like MSN Money columnist Liz Pulliam Weston’s column “Is your degree worth $1 million – or worthless?”

The big mistakes that people make with grad school is that they enroll because (1) they think they have no other options and don’t know what else there is to do, and/or (2) they don’t have a clear, well thought out and researched career goal in mind.

Here is an example of such a mistake: say you decide you want to work in Washington D.C. as a policy researcher for a think tank by getting a masters or Ph.D. in political science – without doing a lot of research about how much you would be paid, how long it would take to pay back your loans, and where you (seriously) would have a good chance of getting a job. And without talking with several people in the job of your dreams to get the real story about it.

You avoid these mistakes by choosing a career that matches your personality using a science-based process for making a decision. It takes a little work, but it is straightforward and intuitive. My choice to go to law school wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t like I didn’t doubt it in tough times. But I knew I’d done a lot of soul searching and research to make the decision – that ultimately proved to be the right choice and one without regrets. I hope you’ll do the same.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Although we at Career Key do not sell or share user data (see our Privacy Policy here), many other websites do. Unfortunately there are many job search, business startup, and other Internet scams designed to get your personal information.

I include fake online career tests in the scam category because I believe they are harmful and in the private sector, almost exclusively used to get people’s email addresses and personal information for marketing purposes – not to genuinely help people to make a good career decision.

So it pays to be careful in your career planning online. The tips found via the links below apply equally to career planning and career advice websites as to job search websites. Although Career Key doesn’t require people to register to use our sites, many other websites do.

So make sure you read these tips before registering on any site:

• About.com Job Search editor Alison Doyle’s article on Online Job Search Privacy
• Online Job-Search Websites: Tips to Safeguard Your Privacy from privacyrights.org
• World Privacy Forum on Job Search Sites and their Workplace Privacy Project that includes resources like “Critical Tips for Job Seekers to Avoid Job Scams”
• Want to be a model? Buy a franchise? Be a mystery shopper? Work at home? There are tons of scams related to these and many other fields so watch out! The Federal Trade Commission offers a lot of helpful advice about a variety of job search, business opportunity, education and scholarship scams.

I know this is tired advice but it never seems to go out of style. If it is too good to be true, it isn’t.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Sometimes we make career development harder and more complicated than it needs to be. If you’re one of those people, like me, who is prone to overthinking and overanalyzing their lives, you can wallow in indecision and inaction for too long. Like procrastination, inaction breeds stress. So make a career development plan and start implementing it today.

I bring up career indecision and career development because they are a couple of the top reasons people come to The Career Key and this blog. We have many professional career advice articles on career development topics.

I’m not suggesting shortcut your process of choosing a career or evaluating your career options. But at some point you need to make a plan; and it may surprise you that you have short and long term goals – ones that take planning to achieve.

I recommend taking these steps proven to be effective:

1. Choose a career that matches your personality. You’ll see from our article “Getting Started” there are 3 steps: Know yourself, know your options, make a good decision.
2. If you’re in school or choosing an educational program, choose a major or program that matches your personality. A recent study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior shows making a choice this way leads to better grades and graduation rates.
3. Do the ongoing career maintenance to be successful. Do you work out or color your hair on regular basis? Are you taking care of your career development with the same enthusiasm?

Adopt the principles of the Free Agent Worker. You don’t need to fixate on career development every day – but incorporate these principles into your life and success and control over your career will flow.

My blog has many articles with practical steps you can take today to jumpstart your career, from researching career options to doing informational interviews via social networking. Just search the blog or look at the labels (like Career Tips) for what you need. As always, I love getting your feedback!

The Career Key has added new and more careers to the “match your personality with careers” sections of The Career Key and The Career Key Canada, both on the popular career test and at the websites.

The Career Key’s author, Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, just completed a 2009 comprehensive update of our unique occupation classification system of careers that match Holland’s 6 personality types.

The Career Key now offers the most updated classification of occupations based on Holland’s Theory of Career Choice. We are working on an ePublication for career development professionals with 600+ occupational titles, including those from the O*Net – please comment or contact me if you are interested in being notified when it becomes available.

Dr. Jones added careers and shifted some work groups to reflect changes in technology, the economy, and job titles. To learn more about our unique, practically useful classification system and the updates, please visit our online Career Key Manual. A few weeks ago, we also updated the complete The Career Key Manual with new research studies, the updated classification system, and the new and unique Career Key Map to Career Clusters and Pathways. More about Career Clusters soon…

For technical reasons and to limit disruption to our current users, we are doing this in a gradual way. Here’s our 3 step roll out plan:

1. We have already updated our paper/pencil version of the test available in our eBookstore. We also added a new, paper/pencil Canadian version of The Career Key test, with Canadian job titles. We also added Canadian careers less common in the U.S.
2. In May, we will start updating the “Match Your Personality with Careers” section of our Career Key website. The new update is already online at The Career Key Canada website.
3. This summer we will update the career selection pages of the online The Career Key test. But starting in May, current online Career Key test takers can begin accessing the new careers, in addition to the ones offered during the test.

A small sample of a few of the careers we added:

Realistic: Cartographer or Photogrammetrist
Investigative: Computer or Information Scientist
Artistic: Multi-Media Artist or Animator
Social: Health Educator
Enterprising: Financial Examiner
Conventional: Insurance Underwriter

As you can guess, we’ve been really busy. Let’s just say Dr. Jones and I didn’t have much of a Christmas vacation. (or much recent vacation for that matter) But we wanted to get all this information up and out being used. So enjoy! As always, if you don’t see a career you think we should have listed or any other feedback, please comment or email me.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices  career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.

Learning about your career options and planning and preparing your career path are proven success strategies, regardless of generation. Top guidance and career counselors are trained to provide this kind of help. Ideally, you get realistic and practical advice along with encouragement to reach for higher goals.

A good example of top notch career guidance is Ilene Frommer, who was recently profiled in the New York Times. She is a guidance counselor at a public high school in Sonoma County California. Once you read about a typical day in the life of Ms. Frommer, you’ll not only appreciate the critical work she does, but also the work of thousands of other excellent school counselors across the country. Visit her high school’s online college and career planning resources to see what top quality advice she provides her students and parents. If you’re a working adult contemplating a career change, much of the advice is timeless.

Even if you do not have access to a counselor like Ms. Frommer, thanks to the internet you can take a page from her playbook (forgive the sports metaphor) and learn from her career planning approach, which is similar to ours. In fact, Naviance – the online course, college and career planning system her school uses, includes The Career Key as part of their product. Whether you are 17 years old or 50, the lessons are the same – research and planning, career information and preparation, are your tickets to success.

This blog post was graciously submitted to BizzyWomen by The Career Key Blog, run by Juliet Wehr Jones, J.D.  The Career Key™ gives you expert help with your career search and career choices — career change, career planning, job skills, and choosing a college major. Our career assessment helps you find a career by matching your personality with careers and providing you complete and accurate information about each career you choose to explore.