Spotlight at the National Careers Service
National Careers Service website – helping you make the right connections
At the National Careers Service a major part of our role is to help you generate ideas for jobs, and to help you find the information you need to decide if they’re suitable for you. That’s where our job profiles and job market information fact sheets come in.
But before we take a closer look at those, it’s important to note that we also offer tools such as the Skills Health Check, which can help you to find out more about your strengths and personality type. If you’re new to the site and looking for career ideas, you might want to make the Skills Health Check your first port of call. It can help you to get to know yourself better and set you off in the right direction.
More related job market information
To help you make career decisions, you can browse through over 130 job market information factsheets produced by Sector Skills Councils (SSCs). These offer labour market data, such as if a sector has been expanding or contracting, and where in the country most of the opportunities are.
We know that with such a large number of pages, it can take time to find what you want. What’s even more difficult is connecting the right job market information fact sheet to the individual job profiles. So we’ve done it for you – at the end of most job profiles you’ll find job market information for a directly-related industry, plus links to other industry info that is also relevant to that job. This is because a number of jobs are in more than one industry. For example, on the web developer profile there’s a link to the fact sheet from e-skills - the SSC for the IT and telecoms industries - as it’s an IT job; but there’s an additional link to Creative Skillset - the SSC for the creative industries - as many web developers work in digital media. We list up to a maximum of six relevant fact sheets.
Unfortunately, not all job profiles have linked job market information. This is because some jobs are in fields that aren’t covered by a Sector Skills Council. It can also be because the job appears in so many different industries that it would mean listing too many factsheets.
Making the connections between similar jobs
The job profiles form a huge part of our site – there are almost 800 of them! These go into detail about each individual job, telling you what the job’s like, the skills and qualifications you might need, and who the major employers are. But with such a large number of jobs it can help if there’s a way you can browse through similar jobs until you find exactly what you’re looking for. That’s why in our related careers box in the right hand column you’ll find jobs that:
- are in a similar field
- have similar skill sets
- offer common progression routes.
We know there are many factors that go into deciding which job will suit you best, from the hours to the qualifications, and from salary to self-employment options. So if you get excited about one of our job profiles, only to find that there’s something that makes it unsuitable for you, don’t despair – have a look at the related careers box and see if there’s an ideal plan B for you in there. In the coming weeks and months we will be expanding the number of listed related careers, so there will be even more options for you.
Both job market information and job profiles are scheduled for updates in the coming months, so keep checking back for the latest info.
