Maximize your job search and career planning with these valuable online career planning tools that will help you assess your career interests, research companies, find recommended networking websites, and help you get prepared. Check out these hot career planning sites now:
Career Assessment
Discover your personal passion with these career assessment tools. Matching your personal interests and aptitudes with the right job is what proper career planning is all about. We all excel at things we enjoy … and enjoy things that we excel at.
Assessment.com contains a career assessment tool called MAPP which stands for Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential. In a few minutes you can answer a list of questions and determine your motivations towards work. Based on your key motivators, career categories/fields are recommended that match your interests and motivations. You can get a free report or a full report for a fee (ranging from $19.95 – $129.95).
The Princeton Review Career Quiz
This is a really quick, fun quiz that takes just a minute or two and then you immediately get the results of your interest and style profile. By signing up for free, you then get a list of careers that match up with you interest and style. You can click on any of the suggested career fields and it will then give you a day-in-the-life job description, associated careers, and more. Give it a try – you might discover a new interest or validate that you’re currently in the right field. I found out that I’m a match with what I’ve been doing and with what I am currently pursuing.
Company and Industry Research
Research industries and companies and learn all that you can to help with your career planning and job search, and get you prepared for the interviews.
A quick one-stop reference for business information: industry overviews, company directories, Fortune 500 lists and more.
BusinessWeek Online – Company Research
Search over 42,000 public and 322,000 private companies worldwide. Find stock quotes, news and press releases, financial data and key competitors. Research compensation, biographies, and board relationships of key company executives.
Lists of everything imaginable – best small companies, best big companies, fastest growing, top private, world’s biggest and more.
Quickly get information on the top 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. With a quick click on Top 100 Lists you can drill-down and get all sorts of statistics on the top 100 fastest growing private companies.
Easily search for news articles on the web on any given company, industry or topic. The site also has state and market links to every major media outlet: magazine, newspaper, TV and radio for easy access and on news with the U.S. and beyond .
Find Articles.com – Now Super-Powered by BNET
Another great news and article search tool that allows you to search by most popular topics, publications or by key categories and industries.
Networking
Never under estimate the power of connections. In many situations it’s who you know that will ultimately get you the job. Build your social and professional networks with these selected networking sites.
A social utility that helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Enough said!
From a business networking standpoint this is the best networking site. You can connect with past co-workers, friends and associates on a professional level. You build your network of connections which then builds exponentially based on the “friends of friends” philosophy. You can interact, get introductions, make recommendations, and more. The really nice feature is that it shows you who you are connected to when searching for jobs on the major search sites.
This is a new one I’ve just been invited to try. It’s a reputation network whereby you build and monitor your online reputation, review your peers, promote your good name on search engines, and communicate with reputable professionals.
Plaxo Pulse is a great way to stay in touch with friends, family and business associates. It enables you to discover the content your friends are creating and share your own. When you or any of your contacts makes a change to the stored information, updates such as new job, contact info, etc. appear on your “pulse” page. A really neat way to quickly see who’s going where and doing what.
