This document discusses self-understanding and its importance for career development. It provides information on resources available through the career services office to help students explore careers and majors, gain experience through internships, and learn about their personality, interests, skills, and values through assessments. These assessments, like StrengthsQuest and MyPlan, help students discover their talents and values to develop self-understanding, which allows them to integrate their values into decision-making. Understanding personality and interests through Holland's theory can also help match students to satisfying careers.

1. Who Are
You?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Claire Childress and Sarah Crockett
DSA Professional Development Day
September 20, 2011

2. If you don’t understand
yourself you don’t
understand anybody else.
--Nikki Giovanni

3. DSA Aspiration
Pursue SELF-UNDERSTANDING and INTEGRITY
Virginia Tech students will form
a set of affirmative values and develop
the self-understanding to integrate these
values into their decision-making.

4. Self-Understanding
and
Career Services

5. How Can Career Services Help?
• Exploring Careers and Majors
– Walk-in Advising
– Appointments
– UNIV 2004 Course
– Departmental Career Advisors
– Career Resource Center
– Extensive Online Resources
• Gaining Experience
– Cooperative Education / Internship Program
• Self-Assessment
– Online and Written

6. MyPlan Assessment
• Online Career Planning Program
– Allows students to review careers and majors
• Results show preferences in four areas
– Personality
– Interests
– Skills
– Values

7. Strengths
Who Are You?

8. StrengthsQuest Talents
• A special natural ability or aptitude
• A capacity for achievement or success; ability
• A naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling,
or behavior that can be productively applied

9. Creating a Strength

10. Values
Who Are You?

11. NEEDS
VALUES
MORAL
S
WANTS
ETHICS

12. So, What’s the Difference?
• Values
– Principles or standards upon which you make most
decisions in your life
• Needs
– Things useful, required or desired
• Wants
– Wishes or desires
• Morals
– Principles or standards or habits with respect to right or
wrong in conduct
• Ethics
– A person’s system or code of morals; standards of
conduct and moral judgment

13. Values Defined
Deeply held commitments that
influence your thinking when you
are faced with choices.

14. Values in Career Development
• Few people really know what they want in life
because they have never really taken the time
and effort to determine what matters in their lives
• To determine what you want, you must first know
what is important to you in your life
– The values that give your life meaning!
• You will need to discover your hidden values

15. Where Do Your Values
Come From?
• From YOU!!
– People choose and formulate their values as they
direct their lives
• From parents, family, friends, religious beliefs,
community influence
• Can be seen in everyday actions and how you
make your decisions
• You may not always be aware of them

16. Criteria for Values
• Prizing: emphasizing emotions and feelings
• Choosing: relies on thinking and reasoning
• Acting: implies behavior
Basically we form our values
by feeling, thoughts and actions

17. Values Clarification
How Do Your Personal and Work
Values Relate to Strengths

18. Instructions
• On the orange sheet:
– Check off all the values that you feel the most strongly
about and from your selection choose your top five
• Compare the top five you just chose with your
MyPlan work values
• Select your top five from both sets of values and
write them on the green bull's-eye sheet
• Review your top five strengths and consider how
any of them relate to your values
• Share your thoughts with a partner or small
group

19. Interests
Who Are You?

20. John Holland’s Theory
• People have personalities AND Jobs have
personalities
• To increase satisfaction in a career, match the
personality traits
• People and work environments can be classified
into six different groups
Realistic | Investigative | Artistic
Social | Enterprising | Conventional

21. John Holland’s Theory
• Different personalities prefer different
environments
• May have some interests in several areas, but
primarily in two or three of the areas
• These three letters identify your Holland Code
– RIASEC

22. The Holland Hexagon

23. Code Breakers
Become More Familiar with
Interest Areas and How They Can
Relate to Strengths

24. Personality
Who Are You?

25. Student Perspective
Self-Understanding and Integrity

27. Who Are You?
Who? Who?
Who? Who?
Questions?
Claire Childress, childrec@vt.edu
Sarah Crockett, sarahec@vt.edu
Smith Career Center
540-231-6241