Career exploration can open you up to a whole new world of work — even in your own backyard.
There are many effective strategies for career exploration that can help you identify a satisfying career and accelerate your job search. These strategies include online research, informational interviewing and seeking out mentoring.
Career Tracks for Career Mobility
The UC classification system Career Tracks in Human Resources can help you define career and development paths for specific job families and functions. Review Career Tracks Standards for your current job function, and explore related job functions within your job family, or even other job families of interest, as a form of career exploration.
Job family is a group of jobs that involve work in the same general occupation. These jobs have related knowledge requirements, skill sets, and abilities. Finance is an example of a family.
Job function is a more specialized area within a family. In a function, the same or relatively similar work is performed, a similar skill set is required, and it is possible to move within the function with minimal training. For example, Purchasing is a function within the Finance family.
Once you identify job functions of interest, you can set up job alerts for those functions so you never miss a UC Davis job posting (UC Path > Job Search > Save Search > Notify me when new jobs meet my criteria). In this way, Career Tracks supports targeted career planning. You can This gives you the opportunity
Explore Career Tracks to:
- Obtain accurate information about different occupations at UC Davis and UC Davis Health.
- Research the representative duties, knowledge, skills, and abilities for a role that interests you before it posts.
- Define the necessary skills to develop, and experiences to pursue, to be competitive for a new role.
- Pursue professional development to support your next career move in a proactive way.
Also consider the following in your career exploration: