We use the term career navigation as an umbrella term that includes resource navigation and career coaching. This website is focused on career coaching. We recognize the importance of resource navigation. It is an important prerequisite to career coaching for many people. It is nearly impossible for people to think about career planning if they are struggling with basic needs. We’re not the experts in those areas, but we’ve worked side-by-side with many of them. Resource navigation helps people identify and overcome barriers to employment such as safe and affordable housing, access to food, reliable transportation, affordable healthcare, and childcare. Once basic needs are addressed, the focus can move onward to career planning. This is where our tools are helpful.
We, like many coaches, view career coaching as a series of steps. Our assessments, reports, website, and certificate are specifically designed to make this process easy and effective. Here’s how it all fits together:
Self-Awareness
The JOFI Job Fit Report includes profiles and supporting details on career interests and personality traits. The career interests profile defines what the participant likes to do at work. We report their top three career interests. Jobs and work assignments that align with their career interests will be interesting and engaging. The personality traits profile is a summary of the participant’s most visible natural behaviors. These personality traits indicate the top five behavioral skills and represent their character strengths. Work tasks that need these strengths will tend to feel natural or easy. Jobs that align with work preferences and character strengths are jobs where they are most likely to perform well and enjoy their work. Thinking about and clarifying these important work-related characteristics develops self-awareness.
The Job Fit Report also introduces the concepts of job-fit and agency. Look carefully at the first three pages of the report and to see how this is done.
Option Exploration
Some jobs fit and are a good path to prosperity and wellbeing. Others are not. We calculate the participant’s job-fit scores for all ONET occupations. Those occupations are grouped into 70 JOFI job families. The Job Fit Report shows the 15 top fit job families. These are occupations where the participant is most likely to thrive. Training and placing people into occupations and jobs that are not a good fit may do more harm than good. Measuring and incorporating job-fit into the process is important for the participant and important for program outcomes.
Participants use their navigation link to access CareerNavigation.org. When accessed via their link, the JOB FAMILIES page highlights the top fit job families with a green background. This is intended to encourage the participant to explore these job families first. We suggest that they pick the three that are most interesting and explore them. Clicking on the job family opens the OCCUPATIONS page where the participant can see each ONET occupation in that family and expand some of them to learn more. Each ONET occupation has a five-star rating of job-fit. This is designed to make it easy for participants to see where they are most likely to enjoy the work, perform well, advance easier, and thrive.
Decision Making
The COMPARE page is designed to make decision making easier. It helps to look at occupations side-by-side to explore them deeper and discover the similarities and differences. This tool helps the participant transition from option exploration to decision making.
The PLAN page is designed to help people envision their path to prosperity and wellbeing. This straightforward three-step model is designed to make it easy for participants to imagine and document their path forward. They document target occupations, education and training, credentials, and supports needed. This page also enables participants to create a PDF of their plan so they can discuss it with their coach, educators, family members, mentors, and friends.
Action Planning
Action planning will be different depending on the situation. High school students, college students, job seekers, unemployed adults struggling to get started, and employed adults looking for their next role; all have different planning needs. This step needs to be customized by the coach to meet the specific needs of their participants. We have a few tools that could be helpful to job seekers.
The JOFI Employability Certificate is an attestation of the participant’s job-fit for the stated occupation based on their foundational skills. Participants can request multiple certificates from the OCCUPATIONS pages by expanding the ONET occupations and clicking on the Request Certificate button. A complete list of their certificates is provided on the CERTIFICATES page.
The JOFI Job Fit Summary can be used to prepare for job interviews. We recommend coaches encourage participants to review the Job Fit Summary carefully and be prepared to describe each of their career interests and personality traits in their own words. Participants can access their Job Fit Summary via the JOB FIT SUMMARY page.
Pursuing Excellence Together
The coaches we work closely with are striving for excellence. Together we look for ways to improve the coaching process with the goal of providing a highly effective career navigation experience for all program participants. We've observed that the highest performing career navigation programs have these elements:
- Identify barriers and address basic needs first.
- Develop self-awareness with valid and reliable assessments.
- Incorporate measures of job-fit based on cognitive skills, personality traits, and career interests to guide exploration of various ONET occupations.
- Incorporate labor market information (wage data, employment levels, job growth, and local job demand) in the decision process.
- Develop and document a career plan specifically for the participant.
- Incorporate extensive information about education and training options.
- Include certificates that attest to strengths and job-related characteristics.
- Interview preparation to clearly articulate strengths and characteristics.
- Place participants into jobs that align with their natural strengths and work-related characteristics; the top ranked jobs based on job-fit scores.
Programs that include these elements tend to have better training outcomes, employment outcomes, and overall program performance outcomes.
Closing Comments
Our assessments and tools focus on the essentials for career navigation. No more, no less. Job-Fit is a powerful concept that guides people to paths where they are most likely to thrive and away from paths where they are likely to struggle. Our assessments and tools measure relevant characteristics and combine them into an easy-to-use five-star rating.
Our tools are designed to support coaches and participants. They are not intended to be used independently without the support of a qualified career coach. Coaches bring empathy, expertise, and additional tools to the table. Our goal is to make it easy for coaches to incorporate high quality measures of job-fit into their career navigation process.
Coaches, thank you for the important work you do. Please reach out to us at support@jofiscore.com if we can be of assistance to you.
Thanks,
The JOFI Support Team