This is the fifth post in a series delving into the various aspects of the Career Cruising database available through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Digital Library. Read all posts here.

Tech Talk: Career Cruising – Financial Aid

This post will be a more in-depth discussion of the financial aid feature.  The financial aid tab of Career Cruising is literally a treasure trove of information and money. It lists thousands of scholarships as well as information on federal financial aid.

There are three ways to search the database: alphabetically, by keyword search, and by using the financial aid selector.

The financial aid selector lets you choose specific parameters that apply to you, such as location, ancestry, major, interests, special needs, etc. It will search the database to find matching scholarships.  The results include links to the scholarship website with the respective application information.

You can also search by keyword. For example, the database returns five scholarships that have the keyword “Louisiana” in their name. Again, a link to the scholarship website is included in the results.

If you have time on your hands, try searching the database alphabetically and just browse the different scholarships. You will come across some off-the-beaten-path scholarships, such as the Fifth Month Scholarship or the Gulf Coast Hurricane Scholarship.

The financial aid tab also includes extensive information on how to apply for Federal Financial Aid (FAFSA), its regulations, and application guidelines.

The financial aid tab is an ideal add-on to the education section. The database’s most valuable feature is its exhaustive listing of available scholarships. Some of them seem so obscure that surely not many students will know about them, thus increasing the chances for the few that do find out about them. So, if you or your children are planning for college, be smart and use Career Cruising’s Financial Aid feature to search for additional college funding opportunities.

This resource is free to you with a valid EBRPL library card through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Digital Library.

Written by Anne Nowak

Note: This article was originally published in January 2018. It has been reposted here, with updates, in order to reach a new audience.

This is the fourth post in a series delving into the various aspects of the Career Cruising database available through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Digital Library. Read all posts here.

In Career Cruising, the education tab lets you research your post-secondary education path from finding majors and the right school to how to best utilize your four years of high school in order to prepare for college. It contains comprehensive information about schools and provides links to their websites. It’s a perfect one-stop-shop for your college research.

The first feature under the education tab lets you explore colleges and majors. You can search colleges by state or by major.

For Louisiana, the list includes 114 schools, which includes every kind of post-secondary school from career colleges and beauty schools to universities offering graduate degrees.

If you already know what you want to major in and want to find out which schools offer your field, you can search by major. For example, if you want to major in kinesiology or exercise science and want to find a school in Louisiana, these are your choices.

If you want to expand your search to other states, you can easily adjust the search filters.

The next feature lets you compare up to three schools side by side. It compares almost every statistic available for educational institutions. You can compare size, cost, average financial aid packages, which majors are offered, which NCAA sports teams are fielded, and, of course, admissions requirements.

If you have a number of requirements for your college and wonder which schools satisfy all of them, use the School Selector tool. Here you can choose different parameters, such as: public or private school, city, suburban, small town or rural setting, school size, admission difficulty, tuition, athletics, majors offered, and campus services. You can combine any of these criteria and see what’s possible. If it exists, Career Cruising will tell you where.

Last but not least, Career Cruising offers a planning timeline for college admissions. In a detailed description, the database describes which steps toward college choice and admission you should take during which year of high school.

As it did for occupational information, Career Cruising contains an incredible amount of data and information about post-secondary education and institutions. It is an easy-to-use tool for exploration, either to browse “what’s out there” or to do a targeted college or major search. If you are in the market for a college education, Career Cruising should be your go-to site for research.

This resource is free to you with a valid EBRPL library card through its Digital Library.

Written by Anne Nowak

Note: This article was originally published in October 2017. It has been reposted here, with updates, in order to reach a new audience.

This is the third post in a series delving into various aspects of the Career Cruising database available through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Digital Library.  Read all posts here.

This post will be a more in-depth discussion of the careers feature.  The careers tab contains exhaustive information about a large number of occupations. The information is displayed in a very user-friendly way and serves as a great starting point for your career exploration.

You can search occupations in five different ways, either alphabetically, by school subject, career cluster, industry, or using the career selector. The most innovative tool is definitely the career selector. Here you can narrow down your career choice with several parameters: school subject, career cluster, type of education, core tasks, earnings, and working conditions.

My parameters were:

• school subject – English
• career cluster – business management and administration
• type of education – 4-year degree; core tasks – Artistic Expression, Building or Creating Things, Organizing People and Planning Work Activities, Writing
• earnings – 60,000 or more per year

And these are the matches the career selector found:

It’s fun to play with and see how the results change when you adjust the parameters.

Another interesting way to search is by school subject. Let’s see what the options are if our favorite subject is English and we don’t plan to go to college. There are twenty-seven results.

Each of the occupations is clickable and will lead to in-depth information about the respective occupation. Let’s choose court clerk:

For each occupation you will get two video interviews with people doing that particular job. There is information about typical salaries, the necessary education and qualifications, a sample career path, and links to the respective professional organizations. Another useful feature is the link to closely related careers. For court clerk, Career Cruising considers the following to be related careers.

This is a great tool for people in the career discovery stage as you get a lot of information about careers in a certain area of interest that you might not have thought about otherwise.

Last but not least, you can get great information about all the different military careers that are available in the different branches of the armed forces.

We chose to search by job family, but you can also look alphabetically or by service branch. If you click on a certain job family, it will display the different occupations within, tell you if they are officer or enlisted paths, give you a description of job content, and also show you closely related civilian careers.

Overall, this database can give you comprehensive occupational information presented in a very user-friendly and intuitive way. We highly recommend it as a starting point for anybody who is considering his or her career path regardless of age, education level, and career stage. This resource is free to you with a valid EBRPL library card through the Digital Library.

Written by Anne Nowak.

Note: This article was originally published in August 2017. It has been reposted here, with updates, in order to reach a new audience.

This is the second post in a series delving into the various aspects of the Career Cruising database available through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s Digital Library. Read all posts here.

The first step to any career decision is self-knowledge. You need to know what you want in order to pursue it. Assessments can be a useful first step to help you figure out what career you want to pursue. Career Cruising offers two assessments, the Matchmaker & My Skills and the Learning Styles Inventory.  Before you start your assessments, you will have to create a free account with Career Cruising.

The Matchmaker assesses your interest in certain common work activities. It is very intuitive. You will be presented a number of questions about common occupational tasks, and you choose the answer that applies most: dislike very much; dislike; does not matter; like; like very much.

Before you start you are also asked to indicate the level of education you aspire to or already have. The database will present you only with jobs that match your interests and the indicated education level.

After you finish answering the questions, Career Cruising will present you with a list of occupations that match your indicated interests.

At this point you could change the level of education to see what matching careers would be available with a different degree of education.

You can stop here and explore the indicated careers further by clicking on the link to get to in-depth information about each respective career. Or you can continue the assessment, which now changes scope and asks about the skills most commonly associated with your matching careers. You again answer the questions on a five point scale: highly skilled; skilled; have some skill; don’t have this skill; can’t answer this.

The results of the skills assessment will be incorporated with the results of the interest assessment and shows if you have the skills most commonly associated with those careers. Now, it is important to note that this skills assessment depends on your self-reported answers. Therefore it is not an objective overview of your skills.

Now you can see if you already have the major skills needed for the careers you are interested in. This serves as great input for further research.

The second assessment, the Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) will show you how you best process information. There are three types of learning or ways of processing information: visual (looking at information, graphs, images, etc); auditory (listening to information); and tactile (hands-on learning). Most people prefer one way of learning over the others. This information can be especially useful for students who are still contemplating their further education and career path.

Both assessments are a good start for your career exploration. They are intuitive and quick to take and will lead you to more information about matching careers.

The Career Cruising database can be accessed through the EBRPL Digital Library.

Written by Anne Nowak.

Note: This article was originally published in June 2017. It has been re-posted here with updates in order to reach a new audience.