Getting Started
What is a career exploration tool?
While we encourage you to explore these assessments and tools yourself, we understand that these tools are often most impactful when utilized with a career professional to assist in fully exploring the results and resources available. To help you get started, let's answer a few questions about what these tools are and why they can be helpful:
What is a career exploration tool?
- Generally, these are tools or programs that are designed to help you determine your career-related skills, interests and values and provide insight into career paths you might be interested in based on your assessments.
Why are these tools helpful?
- Career Exploration Tools designed specifically for graduate students are useful not only because these tools can help to assess what career paths are a good fit for you in terms of your interests, skills, and values but, more importantly, because they present a range careers possibilities that are appropriate to your area of expertise or discipline.
- Combining career assessment tools with an IDP or an individual development plan during your graduate career can help you assess areas of needed skills development towards specific career paths, keep you on track with your writing and academic development, and assist you with time and project management.
There are many career exploration tools out there. Some are created for a very broad, general audience while others have been specifically created for graduate students. Explore the resources below to find the tool that is the best fit for you.
Career Exploration Tools
- The University Career Center offers a number of general career exploration assessments. Learn more about theses assessments and how Career Center staff can explore your results with you by visiting this page>>
- The following books are also great resources to help you get started with your career exploration and are available via the KU Libraries:
- For graduate students in the humanities, social sciences, and some departments within the School of the Arts such as Theatre, Film & Media Studies, and Visual Art Education we recommend ImaginePhD, developed by the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC) and funded by Universities across the US and Canada. A robust career exploration and planning tool, ImaginePhD is now available at www.imaginephd.com.
- For graduate students in the school of the arts, we recommend visual arts students explore The Art Career Project.
- For graduate students in the natural sciences and math, we recommend Science Careers​ MyIDP, developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). To start your MyIDP click here.
- About MyIDP: Science Careers offers a wide variety of content designed to assist scientists of all disciplines, backgrounds and experience levels navigate their career path. This includes thousands of job listings that are updated daily, thousands of career advice articles written by the ScienceCareers editorial staff, graduate program information, meetings and event information, and a Career Forum where scientists can join a community of experts and peers engaging in real time discussions around career issues.
- For graduate students in chemistry, we recommend ChemIDP developed by the American Chemical Society.
- For graduate students in the school of engineering, we recommend Science Careers​ MyIDP, developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). To start your MyIDP click here.
- Additionally, the Engineering Career Center's website contains a number of resources for career exploration.
Career Leader is a career exploration and self-assessment tool developed for those pursuing degrees in business. Explore the exploration and self-assessment tool here.
To further discuss your assessment results or for additional support, please visit Business Career Services via the contact information provided in the section below.