What is the Careers Values Tool?
The Careers Values Tool can help you to get to know yourself better. It’s an online activity that can reveal:
- what’s important to you in a job
- what kind of decision maker you are.
Put these two together and the Career Values Tool can help you to decide which jobs might suit you best.
Who can it help?
The Career Values Tool can help you if you’re looking for work, returning to work after time out, or changing career.
Even if you think you know yourself well and you’re happy in your job, it might teach you something new. Remember that your values change throughout your life.
How does the Career Values Tool work?
The Tool is very easy to use and has clear instructions to help you work through it. Firstly, you work through a series of statements about values and decision making, selecting how much each one applies to you. You then put your top eight values into order of importance. This can really help you to build up a clear picture of what you want from a job.
The Career Values Tool also looks at the answers you’ve given to the statements on decision making and suggests which kind of approach you take when making decisions. This can help you choose between different job options further down the line.
You can print out your results at this point, or you can go on to the final stage, which is ‘compare jobs’.
Comparing jobs
Once you’ve identified your top eight values, you can score these values against:
- your present or most recent job
- any voluntary work you’ve done
- jobs you want to do in the future.
Assessing how much (or how little!) your present and previous jobs have met your values can help you choose the best job matches for you in the future.
Is there anything I need to do before starting it?
If you just want to complete the questions about work values and decision making, you don’t need to prepare. You just need to answer the questions honestly.
If you want to go as far as the ‘compare jobs’ section, it can help if you have in mind a few jobs that you’d like to do. If you’d like to get some ideas for jobs you might enjoy, you could browse our job profiles or work through our skills and interests assessment.
If you complete the skills and interests assessment first you can identify jobs that suit what you’re interested in and what you’re good at. Working through the Career Values Tool then helps you to narrow things down further to the jobs that fit your values.
How long does it take?
Working through the statements about career values and decision making should take you around ten minutes. But there’s no rush – you can take as much time as you like.
If you move on to the ‘compare jobs’ section, the length of time it takes will depend on how many jobs you want to compare.
What will happen with my personal information?
The information you enter and your personal profile can only be seen by you.
Will it work on my computer?
You'll need Adobe Flash Player to do the assessment. If it's not installed on your computer you can download Flash here.
