Taking a career test is a little like playing "what do you want to be when you grow up?" with a twist. The twist is that career tests can give you ideas about what you possibly should do rather than you simply pondering what you want to do. A personality test can give you an indication of which jobs match your personality type and which careers you may have an aptitude for. You do need to remember that the test results are only an indicator and should not be relied on as an absolute assessment of which career is best for you.

Take a Career Test

That said, spend some time taking a career test or two, conduct a career assessment, review career options and consider how they may fit with your personality. Evaluating your goals and life style can provide insight into what types of jobs you are best suited for. You may also get some information on career options that you hadn't even thought of before. Also some of the tests are actually fun to take. If nothing else, you will gain information on potential careers that you can explore to see if they really are a good fit.

Online Career Tests

A variety of career tests are available online. Some are complicated, others are quick and easy. There are fees for some assessments, others are free. Start with the free tests to see how they work for you.

• Princeton Review Career Quiz (http://www.princetonreview.com/cte/quiz/career_quiz1.asp) - An estimation of your personal interests and usual style, followed by a description of types of occupations and work environments that seemingly match.

• The Career Key, by Lawrence K. Jones (http://www.ncsu.edu/careerkey/) - Based on John Holland's idea of a person-work environment fit: that the choice of an occupation is an expression of one's personality.

• The Career Interest Game, by the University of Missouri (http://www.self-directed-search.com/)

Standard Career Tests

Consider the more in-depth analysis provided by the top rated assessment instruments like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest Inventory, Campbell Interest and Skill Survey, Sigi3, or the Keirsey Temperament Sorter which do charge a fee for products and services but may be well worth the investment.

Check to see if your career services department offers these tests for free and consult with a career counselor about the results.

For more information, be sure to visit http://jobsearch.about.com/od/careertests/a/careertests.htm

This is an excerpt from Finding Your First Job After College Guide which is included in our Real World 101 Care Packages. Visit our Care Package page to find out how to get one for yourself or for a lucky college grad!

Questions are helpful because they give us insight into our thoughts about what we like to do. Activities will help you to see the subconscious things that are “overlooked” by our thoughts. So to get the most out of these activities you can’t just think about them, you have to do them. Take them seriously and talk them over with people you trust to gain ideas. Journal what happens so you can review later and clarify your thoughts. A career counselor is always available for consultation on how to incorporate the knowledge gained from these exercises into a job or internship search and, ultimately, career choices.

Ask a friend

Ask your close friends what they can envision you doing. Don't ask family members, who might somehow have something invested in the life or career you choose (or whom know you so well that they might parrot something you've said before). Simply ask close friends who can offer their objective opinion. Where do they see you? Not what do they want you to do, but where can they plausibly picture you?

Find buried clues

Dig up some of the stuff you made or wrote as a small child. It's possible you'll find clues to your identity that got muffled over the years. The aspirations you talked about and drew pictures of then were your expressions of self before you were aware of society or class-based standards and before peer or family pressure set in.

If your parents didn't keep your childhood things, you can spend some time thinking on your own about what you were like as a child. List the ideas you come up with.

You can also try asking your parents what you wanted to be when you were a kid. The clues aren't always obvious, but they're there.

Test the Waters

If you don't know what you want to do with your life, trying new things to open your mind. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Sign up with a local school district and try substitute teach in most public-school systems, and you may discover something you enjoy.

• Ask friend and family members if you can shadow them at work for a day.

• Pick up a few part-time jobs.

• Consider temp jobs in order to explore the landscape of professions.

Some of these actions may help you find what you want to do in life, but again, they may not. Remember that discovering what you don't want to do is extremely helpful as well.

Tune Out

Another idea to keep in mind is that if you truly want to focus on finding what career is right for you, it's necessary to shed the external noise in your life. Forget what other people think about who you are or what you should do. Weed out from your thoughts the cares and worries about what society thinks. Pay attention only to directions your self leads you. You need to return temporarily to the mindset you had as a child, before you knew about standards or pressures. You only knew what you wanted. Of all the ages in your life, this is a time to be relatively selfish because in order to pinpoint your passion, you need to focus on your own happiness above all else.

This is an excerpt from Finding Your First Job After College Guide which is included in our Real World 101 Care Packages. Visit our Care Package page to find out how to get one for yourself or for a lucky college grad!

Figuring out what you want to do starts with asking yourself questions… LOTS of them! Many people skip over this section because they think it’s not worth it, but if you invest the time to give detailed answer you may discover more than you imagined. If you get stuck on a question or looking for additional insight, ask a friend or family member for help. Don’t keep all of this information in your head. Write it down in a journal to keep and reference later on.

What Do You Want to Do Right Now?

If you say you want to do nothing, your probably don't mean you literally want to stare at a blank wall, doing nothing. You probably mean there's nothing that jumps out at you at the moment that you desperately want to do. That's okay. You don't have to have some kind of clairvoyant picture of the rest of your life before you get your first job. You can still do something.

The Lotto Question

To help you figure out what you want to do, set aside some time during which you can be alone in a quiet place, ask yourself this: What would I do if I won the lottery and never had to work for a salary again? How would you spend your time? Shopping? Playing sports? Cooking? Gardening? Exercising? Rearranging rooms? Chances are that many of the activities you enjoy as hobbies can be turned into full-time jobs. The interests I just named, for example, could indicate that you might enjoy a career as a personal shopper or fashion stylist, athletic coach, personal chef, horticulturist or florist, personal trainer, or interior decorator.

It's important to remind yourself that just because it's easiest to get information on the fields of law, medicine, and consulting doesn't mean you even have to consider those careers. Sometimes we forget that there are thousands of job out there - entire fields, even - that we've never heard of or imagined. It's the same with lifestyles. People do lead thrilling lives outside of the city and the suburbs. They don't necessarily work in an office or during the daylight hours. Just because you haven't been exposed to living in a cabin in the woods or working on a beach in Hawaii doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider it. Furthermore, there are thousands of job ideas that haven't yet crossed your mind. For instance, if you want to work with animals, but you don’t want to be a vet, there are many career options still available. But there might be hundreds of options, from marine biologist to groomer to wildlife rehabilitator to animal psychologist to owner of a pet day care center. Your local library most likely has reference books on many of the different career possibilities.

To find other options, it's also helpful to pay attention to everything around you. Let's say you love chocolate. The chocolate has to be made somewhere, sold by someone, shipped by someplace, placed in boxes designed by someone, marketed by someone, and even taste tested by someone. Behind every product and transaction are long lists of possibilities.

What do I not want?

Again, find some time to yourself when you don't have to think about anything else. This time, ask yourself, "What do I not want?" Sometimes it's easier to come up with things you know you don't want than to conjure up something you do. Go ahead and list all of the things you can think of that you know you don't want: everything from working in a cubicle to a life of solitude, an apartment in the city to competitive workers. Make sure the list is as comprehensive as you can make it. Then flip it. For each item, write down the exact opposite. Don't want to work in a cubicle? Write down that you do want an open-air environment, or an office with a door (which ever is more appealing). By the time you flip everything on your list, you may at least see a few ideas begin to emerge.

After responding to the questions and journaling your answers, take time to contemplate what careers you may be interested in pursuing.

This is an excerpt from Finding Your First Job After College Guide which is included in our Real World 101 Care Packages. Visit our Care Package page to find out how to get one for yourself or for a lucky college grad!

“There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there is only a scarcity of resolve to make it happen.”

- Dr. Wayne Dyer

The search for a career is a process. It involves understanding yourself more and more, as you grow in your understanding of the world around you. It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn’t ever end. It happens over your whole lifetime.

The good news is that when you hold a college degree in your hand, you hold a bazillion options for yourself and your future! You can do or become virtually anything you want to! You simply have to decide where to begin.

While you do need to know what you're looking for before you can embark on an actual job search, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing anything. Sitting back and waiting for some sort of revelation to strike you, telling you what your perfect career direction will be, is not the right approach. It’s just never going to happen that way.

Instead, you should be learning what you enjoy doing (your interests); what you're really good at doing (your skills); what's important to you in a future career (your work values); and what about you personally that complements your other skills (your personality). Then you can explore occupations that could make good use of all those things.

More good news: the same self-evaluation (of interests, skills, values, and personality) that goes into choosing a career direction will also help you market yourself to prospective employers. It’s like getting double credit for some of the most important soul-searching you’ll ever do.

So, in this section you’ll find questions, activities, and information about career tests to help you choose your first job or career. Don’t skip over this stuff--all too often, first-time job seekers overlook these activities. Listen: if you follow the process below, you won't just be sitting back waiting for careers and jobs to land in your lap. You'll be working toward discovering what makes you happy, and how your job can help keep you that way.

This is an excerpt from Finding Your First Job After College Guide which is included in our Real World 101 Care Packages. Visit our Care Package page to find out how to get one for yourself or for a lucky college grad!

If making a good name for yourself online is a priority, it's time to take a proactive approach to getting your name out there the way you want and take your professionalism to the next level. Personal brand building tends to happen over months and years rather than days and weeks. You'll need to commit quite a bit of energy to the process.

Create Your Own Web Site

As more and more people become Web savvy, having your own Web page may be akin to having a business card. Your resume can refer potential employers to your personal Web page that will tell them more about you than merely your resume.

Get a Blog

Writing a blog, could improve your chances as a candidate because an updated sites boosts your ranking in search engines and offers potential employers a full sense of who you are. Linking to articles you have written, online or otherwise, tells your readers that you are active and serious about writing or whatever profession that matches your personal blog to your chosen profession. If a recruiter comes across you, and finds that you have good things to say, you're steps ahead of the next guy, who the recruiter doesn't know.

Tip: Take your blog seriously. Don’t just write about anything and everything that happens to you during the day. A recruiter isn’t interested in reading about how you waited for hours at the doctor’s office. Have something relevant to the industry/field you are seeking a career in. Also, keep your blog up-to-date, it shows recruiters commitment.

Take Advantage of Web 2.0

Social media sites offer countless ways to participate in online community, and most of these profiles offer the added bonus of search engine visibility. Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are six mainstream social media sites that feature results when you perform a web search. They are also high-authority sites that are favored by search engines. Use each one appropriately and make sure to emphasize correct key phrases (such as your name). If you can interlink these social media profiles with your blog posts with acceptable anchor text, you can help push up other positive pages in the search results.

Here are some tips on how to get the most search juice from these profiles:

• Flickr (photo sharing): Use your name in the title and description of the image. In Flickr, you can also add links to comments and HTML. Also, take advantage of tags!

• YouTube (video sharing): The title of your video can help a lot. Popular videos are often ranked high in search results. Make a video resume or talk about your passion to potential employers.

• Digg (social news): Digg and other social news sites allow you to customize your profile with your personal information and affiliated websites. There is also room for a short bio where you can emphasize key words.

• Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia): Wikipedia is a bit of a tricky one because you're not allowed to edit your own page or your company's page as per their guidelines. However, you can contribute to Wikipedia and use the Talk: page to engage in a discussion.

• Facebook (community): In order to display your profile in the Google results, you will need to change your privacy settings.

• Twitter (micro-blogging): Claim your username on Twitter (before someone else does) and fill out the short bio. Follow all of the decision makers in your industry and get tweeting!

Building a brand takes time and commitment, but has great rewards. As you build your brand, remember to be professional because the Internet is like Las Vegas, “What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet.”

This is an excerpt from Finding Your First Job After College Guide which is included in our Real World 101 Care Packages. Visit our Care Package page to find out how to get one for yourself or for a lucky college grad!