Career Assessment for Students

Are you wondering, “What will I do when I grow up? What subjects will I study in high school? College? What kind of work will I do?”

Middle and primary school is a good time to begin asking these questions. But you can start asking these questions at secondary and college level too. It is a good time to explore . . . to learn about jobs and college/university/training options. And, it can be fun and interesting!

It also begins to get serious. For example, at the end of eighth grade many students must start the process of choosing college or university programs and its related courses in high school. You and your parents will want to learn about this and make a good decision.

The Career Key can help you. We recommend,



The Career Key® personality test. When you take the Career Key test you measure the strength of your six Holland personality types and identify jobs in Pakistan that match them.
  • You can also identify the career pathways and training programs that fit your personality and interests.
  • You get full and accurate information about each occupation, and get a 4-page booklet that explains the results.
Choosing a College or Training Program In this article you learn how to make this match following a 4-step process. A close personality-program match is vital. It is one of the predictors of academic success and satisfaction - grades earned and graduation (more . . .)

Identifying and strengthening your job skills. Job skills are what count in the workplace. With marketable skills you are in the driver’s seat. The Foundation Skills: Job Skills All Workers Need describes what they are.

Making good decisions. High Quality Decisions describes steps in making a good decision. Learning how to make good decisions is a “Foundation Skill”. You want to learn this skill, and use it when you make important decisions.

Learning about Dr. John Holland’s Theory of Career Choice. This article is one of our most popular. And it will explain you how and why you need to assess your interest for your career success. 

Physics (Installment 2 of a series)

In the previous installment of this series on NFV, SDN and related issues, I
talked about the relationship between communications and computation (the
merging of which I dubbed computications); now we are ready to take these ideas
one step further.

A computational resource (such as
a server or a laptop computer), as well as a communications resource (such as a router or a
switch), may be a

Computications (Installment 1 of a series)

We have been hearing a lot recently about Network Functions Virtualization
(NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), and how communications could learn a
lot from computer science. This is the first blog entry of a series in which I
will attempt to impose some structure on these ideas by exploring five distinguishable
trends, which I shall dub, respectively :


Computications (on the relationship

Networking - 5 Steps for Building Your Network


Networking can be very helpful to your career. The idea is to develop a network of friendly people who share information to help each other. It is best known as a strategy for opening the hidden job market, for getting a good job. Since many jobs (some would say most) are not advertised, it is essential that you develop friendly relationships with people who can tip you off to job openings -- perhaps even introduce you to the person who is doing the hiring. There is some truth in,

"It's not what you know, but who you know."

Networking has other benefits. You are creating a community of people who support each other, who provide emotional support and information that will help each other. You will learn of new developments in your field: new tools, processes, leaders, training programs, products and services. You may discover the solution to a problem you face at work. And, you may have the satisfaction of providing the key piece of information that makes a real difference in the life of one of those in your network.

Networking is a planned, and ongoing effort. You set goals, develop strategies for achieving them, take action, evaluate how well your plan is working, and make changes as necessary. It is something that you do throughout your career.

To build an effective network, you need both formal and informal networks in place. Formal networks are the type you actually join, usually with dues and regular meetings. These could include a professional association, a group like the Youths' Club, or an association of school graduates. Informal networks may include friends you run into at an annual holiday party, social gathering, friends you keep up with from a former job, people from your mosque, church or temple, or the people you met while you are on picnic. A good network contains both types and has a healthy mix of both business and social conditions.

Here are five steps for building your network:

Choosing a College Program Based on Your Personality



“Choose a college or university program based on your personality and interests.” That is what the research shows over the past many years. Research studies also demonstrate that with a good personality-program match you are likely to,

  • Earn higher grades,
  • Stay with your program of choice,
  • Graduate on time, and
  • Be more satisfied and successful in your career.

Obviously you don’t want to ignore those findings and jeopardize your career!

There are different strategies you can adopt to make a good decision and match your personality with the right career. 

  1. Take a scientifically valid interest inventory or career test that measures your Holland personality types;
  2. Use a valid list of programs/majors organized by Holland personality types to identify those most likely to fit your personality;
  3. Learn about the environment for each program that interests you;
  4. Use similar strategies to choose a career field; and
  5. Make your choice using a 4 step decision-making process.
Recent studies show that a good personality-program match is related to college success.
Generally, the better the match the better students do.

Certainly, there are other factors to consider in choosing a college or university program, but personality-program match is one of the most important.


This blog has been adapted from the article written by Lawrence K. Jones, Ph.D., NCC

Best Online Resources for Learning about College Programs in Pakistan

For students who want to learn about college or training programs, we’ve chosen the best online resources with advice on how to use them. Each site has certain advantages depending on what kind of information you are looking for.

Start by narrowing your college programs choices to those that match your Holland personality types. If you make a close personality-program match, studies show you're more likely to succeed in college. Career Key Pakistan’s articles help you get started, including these:
Once you've narrowed your options, you'll want to learn more about each one as part of a good, 4 step decision making process. These websites can help:

Eduvision

Best for:
  • Finding college or university programs (14000 + programs) from all over the Pakistan, including duration, institution’s category and education system of each of those programs. 
How to use it:
  • Go to Program Finder 
  • Select Field of Study and Level of study 
  • Refine your search by Course and City 


Ilmkidunya

Best for:
  • Finding college and university programs according to course categories, as well as search course/program by qualification level, program type and city. 
How to use it:
  • Press Colleges tab and select Programs and Courses 
  • Search course/program by qualification level, course/program type and city; or 
  • Search programs by Course Category 

Following online forums will help students in finding answers to their career, education and training related questions:

Hamariweb

Best for:
  • Providing career advice on career development issues by a group of professionals and career advisers. 
How to use it: 
  • Press Students Corner on a left had tab and select a Career Counselling link 
  • Student need to register to participate on this forum 


Eduvision

Best for:
  • Providing online counseling on various career related issues
How to use it: 
  • Select Online Counseling tab and press Q&A link for reading posts or press Categories link for reading questions and answers according to various occupational categories 
  • Student need to register to participate on this forum 


Career Counseling Portal Pakistan

Best for:
  • Providing students with counseling services in facilitation of there career choices and subject selection along with providing professional response to the student's personal and psychological growth and development.
How to use it: 
  • Student need registration to participate in various forums
  • Select Register tab and press Student Registration 

High Quality Decision Making

Choosing a career path, making a career decision, or deciding on a college major - all are critical decisions. They demand high-quality decision making

Scientific studies show that there are four essential steps you will want to follow. They are abbreviated ACIP, like "a sip" of tea!

A stands for Alternatives. When making an important decision, look at all your choices. Ask yourself, "Are there any other ways I can solve this problem? Ways that I haven't thought of?"

C stands for Consequences. Once you have narrowed down your choices to those that look best, weigh the pros and cons of each.

I stands for Information. Search for new information about each option you are considering.

P means Plans. Make detailed plans for (a) how you will carry out your decision, and (b) what you will do if one of the negative consequences that you thought of under "C" occurs.

Read more on the Career Key Pakistan website by clicking the links...

The Career Key Pakistan

Why the Career Key® Pakistan is # 1 source of choosing a career...?
  • Based on the latest science and best practices of career and college counselling;
  • Respected by professionals, worldwide;
  • One of a few scientifically valid career tests (it measures what is claimed);
  • Based on Holland's theory of career choice and best science and practices of career counselling;
  • Accurate, comprehensive information about matching occupations;
  • Featured in Wall Street Journal;
  • Licensed by top education companies;
  • Translated in many languages including Urdu;
  • Created by Dr. Lawrence K. Jones, NCC, counselling psychologist.
  • 30 million users since 1997;
The Career Key Pakistan has been adapted for use with Pakiatani students. It is available in both Urdu and English languages. 

Organization of The Career Key Pakistan


The Career Key Pakistan is organized according to the three basic principles of good decision making:



1. Know yourself 

Your strengths, values, personality, and skills. This will help you decide which choice best fits you.

To learn about occupations, go to Learn More about the Jobs that Interest Me, Learn about Occupations.

At High-Quality Decision Making you will learn a method based on many scientific studies that is widely used in business and medical settings. It is easy to understand and use.

Take the Career Key test to discover which Holland personality types you are most like. You can then match the results with the most promising careers, career pathways and training programs.

Read about Holland's Theory of Career Choice to understand how your success and satisfaction in a job, school, or college is related to your personality.

Do the activities in Learn More about Yourself and Identify Your Skills to understand yourself better.

2. Know your options

Job Satisfaction will help you optimize your job satisfaction when you choose a career or a job. It can also help you analyze why you are dissatisfied in your job, if you are one of the many who are.

To learn about education options, go to Choose a College or Training Program.

Are you thinking of strengthening your job skills but you are unsure which ones are important? See The Foundation Skills.

3. Make a good decision

Still not sure? Go to Career Indecision and consider getting help from a professional counsellor: Career and Educational Counselling

CAPping routed and SDN networks

In my last blog entry I discussed two differences between SDN and conventional networking. The second was that SDN returns to centralized control as compared to a distributed control plane (I’ll return to the first difference in just a moment). And this means that there is a single point of failure, even if the controller itself has built-in redundancy.

There has been discussion in the OpenFlow

Identify Your Skills - Know the Different Types of Skills

Skills are the key to any job success. Learn about the following four skills categories, which you may need in your job search. 

The Foundation Skills are the ones every worker needs. They are organized into four groups: Basic, People, Thinking, and Personal Qualities. They are marketable and transferable skills.

Marketable Skills
Marketable skills are those that an employer will pay you to perform:
  • All of the Foundation Skills, 
  • The skills listed in "Want to Hire" advertisements.
  • Examples of unmarketable skills are, Riding a bike . . . who will pay you to use that skill? Not many. Learning a skill like creative writing will certainly motivate an employer to pay you.

Transferable Skills
Transferable skills are ones that you can transfer from one occupation to another. For example, Architect can transfer their skills to occupations like "Civil Engineer" and "Electrical Drafter." Your transferable skills are valuable because they enable you to work in a variety of occupations.

Motivated Skills
Motivated skills are those skills that you enjoy using. If at all possible, you want to work at something you enjoy doing. Think of an achievement, accomplishment, or "good experience" you have had - whether related to work or not. Then, write down or tell someone,
  • What you did,
  • How you did it, and
  • What happened.
You will be describing your motivated skills. These are especially important if you are thinking about your career direction . . . doing what you enjoy doing.

Parents Role in Career and Education Planning

Parents are a teenagers primary counselor. As much as teachers, school counselors and other professionals or family members. Parents play a critical role in education and career planning of their children. Parents need to acquire knowledge about educational options, their children’s interests and skill sets and help them through the career exploration and decision-making process.

Informed career decision making process will help student to explore and evaluate the best potential opportunities for their career success and happiness.

Parents’ guidance and support is critical for student career exploration, because
  • Parents have rich knowledge, experience and wisdom; although the student’s interests and talents may be very different from a parents, however, the the can still guide them in student career exploration - particularly by listening and advising.
  • Students often choose their school or college options either without any research or under peer influence. This situation demands that parents encourage their children to gather all the relevant information to make an informed career choice, keeping in mind both the short- and long-term benefits of their decision.
How parents can help students in their career selection
  • Attitude matters! stay positive and focused on a future of success. Motivate and encourage your children to develop a positive attitude and learn about a variety of occupations and industries. 
  • Appreciate and don't under-estimate or reject ideas that your children may come up with on their educational and career choices. Keep “your” choices to yourself.
  • Explore opportunities together. Informal discussions about the world of work with your children can be productive, particularly after viewing an educational documentary or a TED talk!
  • Your goal is to help your children find their own way based on their interests and skills and not follow your ideas and interests, which could prove counter-productive.
  • Encourage your children to set goals. By starting early with goal setting and action planning, simple and rewarding goals will lead to extremely valuable skills for life and career.
  • Be practical and realistic in your approach but don’t assume something isn’t possible. 
  • Encourage your child to explore their options through work experience and by talking to people in occupations that interest them.
  • Let your children identify and select their area of interest.
Emphasize personal accountability and self management. These are two critical skills consistently found in highly successful people – regardless of what career they choose to follow.

The Action Plan 
The career decision-making process described below includes activities that can be taken at any time from pre-high school and go through high school and post-secondary education.
  1. Enable self-awareness through valid and reliable assessments.
  2. Help your children to explore a variety of options with the goal of narrowing those options to a manageable few.
  3. Explore educational strategies that support a career direction. Evaluate educational options before choosing a school or college.
  4. Research school choices based on career direction and desired education. Not other way round. 
  5. Create an action plan. Planning become much easier if your children have a challenging goal in front of them.
  6. Make a financial plan for your education. Explore all options available to get scholarships, financial aid, fellowships and interest free students loans. Many students of lower income families are provided with significant financial support who performed well academically.
  7. Take action. Motivate your child to work hard in school to build a strong foundation in math, reading, writing, computer skills, and science. The stronger the foundation, the more career options will be available later in life.
  8. Review and revise. As your child matures and gains more knowledge and experience, his/her interests may change.
Remember, separate your desires and wishes from that of your child. It is your child’s future, not yours! Your role is to help them reach their own goals and dreams.

Learn More About Yourself

You want to choose an occupation that fits your unique qualities -- your abilities, talents, needs, values, and interests -- and the life-style you want to live.

Knowing your "unique qualities" is not easy. It is a challenge for everyone. But, the clearer picture you have, the more likely you are to choose a satisfying career.

It is important to write your ideas down. You may find this difficult to do, many do. But, it will make a big difference in your self-understanding. Write down your thoughts and feelings as you do the exercises below. Make a folder to keep your notes and writings.

Here are eight strategies you will find helpful:
  1. Take tests or inventories that measure your abilities, interests, values, and personality. Write out your reactions to the results. 
  2. Look carefully at your achievements in school or at work to identify your abilities. If you are a student, for example, which subjects have you done well in, or not so well in? If you work, do the same analysis. What does this tell you about your abilities -- mechanical, verbal, numerical, artistic, and people skills? Be careful not to overlook, or leave out, your abilities. Looking over the 17 Foundation Skills will help you avoid doing this. 
  3. Examine how you use your leisure time -- your hobbies, community projects, activities with social, political, or religious organizations. For each one, write down three headings: Abilities, Interests, and Values. And, under each heading write down your thoughts. 
  4. Talk with a friend or family member who is a good listener.
  5. Talk with a professional counsellor; learn about career counselling.
  6. Go to Identify Your Skills. There you will learn what the different types of skills are and how to identify those you have. The activities that are described are powerful; they are used by the top consulting firms in the country. You will find them well worth the effort.
  7. Write an autobiography and identify the themes that represent who you are.
  8. Last and most important - write a personal mission statement. In it write: what you want to be, what you want to accomplish in life, and what values or principles you want to guide you.

SDN : A Backward Step Forward

Everyone in the industry is talking about Software Defined Networks or SDNs, but unfortunately no two people using the term mean precisely the same thing. However, after hearing dozens of academicians and even more networking converts, and after reading hundreds of press releases, I believe that when people mention SDN they are talking about a network based on one or both of two guiding

Quality of Experience (QoE)

As a reader of this blog you are doubtless familiar with the concept of the Quality of Service (QoS) of a telecommunications service, by which we mean meeting defined levels of a set of measureable network parameters, such as availability, delay, delay variability, and information loss. The precise set of parameters depends on the service type; for example Bit Error Rate (BER) and Errored Seconds

What is time ?

There is an anecdote about a foreigner visiting London asking a man on the street “what is time?” and receiving the answer “I’m sorry, but I am not a philosopher”.

I don’t want to discuss here the philosophical or physical questions of what time is, but rather what we mean by time in telecommunications applications. In particular, we frequently hear the terms “UTC”, “GPS time”, “NTP time”, and “

iPhone Storms

A few years ago RAD’s president Zohar Zisapel asked me to accompany him to a meeting with another Israeli company concerning possible cooperation on an important issue. On our way I asked him what this important issue was. He replied the iPhone problem and I immediately understood.



He informed me that he had been in the US the previous week, and although he carried a Blackberry and not an

Jobs and Ritchie

October 2011 marked the passing away of two men well-known in the computation and communications industries. One was Steve Jobs. In his honor Apple, Microsoft, and Disneyland all flew their flags at half-staff. October 16, 2011, was declared "Steve Jobs Day" in California. President Obama gave a eulogy calling Jobs “among the greatest of American innovators … a visionary”.

The other was Dennis

The meaning of Apple's '647 patent

On December 19th the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) issued its final determination on Apple's claims against HTC of Taiwan, finding that HTC violated Section 337 of the Tariff Act by selling Android phones containing a technology that infringed a patent held by Apple. Section 337 enables the ITC to block importation into the US of foreign products that unfairly compete with domestic

Moving to FTB!

Today I am freezing my Blogger account and moving my blog to Freethought Blogs, a prominent all-atheist venture. This move will help me earn an income doing what I do, and give my work a higher profile so it will do more good. To make my life manageable I won't be posting here anymore, nor accepting any new comments on posts archived here, but I will keep this account open in order to keep its
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