Career Exploration

In addition to knowing what you have to offer an employer, you need to know what jobs are available to you and whether you want and/or can do them. The process of researching the labour market and jobs is known as career exploration. You’ll want to investigate jobs available in your country (national labour market), your province or state, and your city or community (local labour market). You may even want to research job opportunities in other countries, depending upon how adventurous you are. To learn more, read the section on Labour Market Information and visit the Preparing for Work Resources section.

You will also want to investigate the types of jobs currently being performed by other individuals who are blind or partially sighted. With disability-specific skills and availability of technology, there are very few jobs that are inaccessible. Learning about the work being performed by others is a key part of career exploration. You can find out what tools they use for essential tasks, what training they received, what they like about their jobs, and whether they would recommend such work to others. For videos on blind and partially sighted individuals with varrying careers visit the Success Stories section. 

Once you have learned about the range of jobs out there, you may want to reach out to a few individuals to learn more about them personally. Such a person may be willing to be a mentor to you. Likewise, you will want to find other role models or prospective mentors who are sighted but are doing the kind of work that you want to do. If you’re interested in reaching out to people who might serve as a mentor, you’ll want to first read the Tip Sheet on Finding Mentors.

Finally, to complete the career exploration process, you will need to compare your attributes to the requirements for workers doing the type of work you want to do. This comparative process is known as matching yourself to jobs. You can read all about this technique in the Job-Self Match Tip Sheet.