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.