Are you good at receiving compliments? Many of us are not. Yet, compliments can be an excellent way to learn more about our own personal strengths. Sometimes an outside perspective is a fresh honest perspective that may be in our personal growth blind spot.

This is valuable information when we begin to look at what our strengths are and how they can be translated into a career that plays to them. Today we are going to be taking a look at how to make the leap from our strengths to a potential job(s) in the current employment environment.

To do this, I will be highlighting some of the powerful features of my online career coaching tool, My Career Design Studio™ (MCDS) and how it can walk you through this process step-by-step.  I created MCDS to help individuals who wanted to find an alignment between their strengths, values and interests and a meaningful career. If you have not signed up for MDCS, please take advantage of my seven-day free trial.

What Are You Good At?

First of all, it is important to do a deeper dive into your natural strengths and interests to understand them better. The MCDS Raw Materials section will help you to reflect on this. It examines your personality profile, work preferences and interests, strengths and challenges, values, life/work balance and even has a section called my ideal day.

In the Strengths and Challenges Section, under Raw Materials, you will get a more qualitative view of your strengths. This information is a key building block in the foundation of your career design. In addition, the results of the questions you answered in the Raw Materials section lead you to figuring out your career interests, your values and what you professionally desire.

What Are Your Options?

Once you have a list of job-related things that are most important to you, you are ready for the next Section known as the Napkin Stretch. Under the Napkin Sketch, there are many subsections to help you prioritize and narrow down the career options that relate to the strengths, interests, and values you identified in the raw materials section.  The rating system used in each of these subsections is a funneling process that helps you hone in on what is most important to you in any potential job(s).

One of the unique things about the My Career Design studio program is that the program is keeping track of all the things you say are important to you as you complete each exercise.  This becomes important in the My Exploration section of the program, where your carefully thought out work preferences are matched with almost 1,000 standardized occupations throughout the U.S. economy in The US Dept. of Labor’s O*NET Online occupational database. This pairing should result in a list of five to twenty job titles for you to consider, many of which you may not have thought of before using this career tool.  When you click on the job title links provided you will see how your job possibilities begin to open up in a powerful new way.

Get the Guidance You Need

Another cool feature of the My Career Design Studio (MCDS) program is it’s virtual career coach.  You can click on the Career Coach button at any time and the virtual career coach will answer your questions or give you more information on any given topic that you have been wondering about.

Now that you know how My Career Design Studio can help you to make the leap from knowing your strengths to creating a roadmap to the career of your dreams, it’s time to sign up and put all this newly acquired knowledge to work. Remember, I offer a seven-day free trial which is designed to give you a worthwhile start to this rewarding journey. Step into your future career. The time is now!