The CVS Occupational Exploration Process

Occupational knowledge is critically important to the career decision-making process. The CVS provides a tool to help you identify your internally-based, preferred Career Vectors which can be used to guide the Occupational Exploration process.

Good career decision-making requires that before you narrow your focus and make choices, an attempt should first be made to get as broad an overview as possible of occupational options that relate to your interests, skills, and personality characteristics. In this way, potentially suitable choices will not be overlooked.

The goal of the CVS Occupational Exploration Process is to help you to expand your awareness of career possibilities that may be of interest to you based on your Career Vector preferences.

Each Career Vector contains clusters of representative occupations that reflect the current job market. The CVS contains a compilation of occupational titles that reflect current patterns of change in the workplace. These include new developments in such areas as STEM- (science, technology, engineering and mathematics,) related careers, IT, the Internet and social media, neuroscience, biotechnology, healthcare and human service careers, and the environmental field.

After you have identified your preferred Career Vectors, you can use this knowledge to identify career areas and occupational possibilities for further exploration.

This is sometimes called the translation process—going from the internal self-exploration phase (looking inward) to the external occupational exploration phase (looking outward) by linking up your self-assessment data to potential occupational options and career directions to explore.