Before making a career choice you will want to do research and to understand more about your options.
As you create your short list of jobs you will have checked out qualifications and skills needed. Now focus more on a clear understanding of industry trends. This is where Labour Market Information (LMI) comes in. It's the way of finding out more about these areas.
Are jobs being outsourced? Impact of social media? Any focus on being 'green'?
Use LMI to find out about the market demand for the jobs? Does LMI suggest trends for more jobs in this area or less? Are the current people working in this area likely to be retiring in the next 5 years thus opening up new opportunities or is it a declining industry and there will be even less opportunities over the years to come?
Use LMI demographic data to identify if this is an expanding or declining career path. Take account of political, social, economic, environment and technological conditions. Which are expanding? Which declining? This will help you identify who to approach.
LMI will also help you to understand typical salaries to enable you to answer any questions on salary expectation and to be able to judge if an offer is fair, or not.
You can find out through current affairs, listening to the news on TV and radio and reading the business section of broadsheet newspapers.
You can also use this LMI widget. (You may need to refresh this page to get the widget to appear)
Use this LMI widget to explore and compare key information about occupations to support your career decision making process.
Type in the title of the job you are interested in and the LMI widget provides a series of options from which you can select the most relevant to you. So, for example search for Accountant and choose the top three from options. You can then see at a glance details on pay, weekly hours of work and future employment prospects.
I see this as a useful resource for my readers and clients, what do you think? Feel free to make a comment below.
