Find the right path
Career Exploration and Career Decision-Making
Move from confused and unsure to clarity and confidence in your career plan.
Being in a job role that doesn’t fit who you are drains you every day. We’ve been there: not knowing how to take steps toward a career transition, feeling confused and trapped, the pressure of having to make money in a job you hate. It’s not sustainable.
Our career decision-making process is customized to your experience, background, and career goals, and we’ll work with you to:
- Build a model of your career preferences based on clues from your interests and passions through the years, personality, strengths, and skills you’re most motivated to use
- Find ideal career options and work environments, and eliminate the career paths that won’t be a good match for you
- Increase your confidence about your career transition
- Get unstuck and successfully move forward on your next career path and get the career satisfaction you deserve
Career Exploration with Dan Hahn
A career exploration process that works
Press play! Our Career Exploration and Career Decision-Making coaching process is based on decades of work with our clients and the best science we know. We move you through this process with ease so you can realize all of your strengths, passions, and skills, and apply them to a career path that’s exciting!
Why our career exploration process works
Our career exploration process was pretty solid before. It was based on a decision science framework we taught at Portland State University for years. We even wrote a book about helping people make challenging life choices. However, working with hundreds of clients over the years made it even better.
Through a combination of personalized support, well-researched career assessments, effective networking, multifactor career search engines, and carefully deployed AI, we deliver an easy facilitation through your career change process. We want you to realize all your gifts and strengths, and apply them to a new career that’s exciting and profitable. Get started now with an Exploratory Call.
Insights and tools that will benefit you for the rest of your career
This career exploration process will give you valuable insight into who you are and what your career values and preferences look like. You’ll use these insights not only to inform your next career move, but your career development over time. You get to come back to this career discovery process years down the road and consider: how much are these things still important to me? Have these values shifted? You’ll use this career guidance over the course of your career for years to come.
Here’s what our sessions usually look like:
Session 1: Background, history, interests and passions
Session 2: Personality assessment interpretation
Session 3: Skills and strengths assessment interpretation and career decision criteria modeling
Session 4: Pathway exploration
Session 5: Evaluation, informational interviewing, networking, and pathway planning
Session 6 (and beyond if needed): Pathway planning and continued networking
Taking stock of who you are (Session 1)
The first step of this exploration process is to take stock of your real strengths, career skills, and preferences, giving you a deeper understanding of who you are.
We inform our career guidance with short writing exercises, effective personality assessments, and strength and skills evaluation. We cover your career interests and passions through the years, considering your experiences as a kid, as a teenager, and as a young adult: Where did you grow up? What were you into? What were the guiding passions you took into your career over time? What interests and values have you left behind?
Throughout our work together, we’ll continue to uncover clues that we’ll bring forward into the model we’re building of you and your career values and true preferences.
Assessing your personality for career exploration (Session 2)
Our guided career assessments start with evaluating your personality: discovering the types of jobs, tasks, and work environments where you’ll thrive. We use assessments based on both the Big 5 model of personality and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
The Big 5 model lets us assess the facets you score high or low on to consider the kinds of work settings and contexts that would be strong fits for you and rule out work environments that won’t work well for you.
The other model of personality we use is the Myers-Briggs. Its scientific validity has been challenged over the years, but we love using this personality model for the creative conversation it generates. The detailed descriptions of personality traits and preferences in the MBTI help us discover the work contexts that might really resonate with you and your career goals.
Evaluating your career skills and strengths (Session 3)
We’ll move from there into the career skills that you want to use more of in your new path. We created our own motivated skills exercise, along with the detailed Gallup strengths assessment. Integrating both allows us to help discover your most compelling career roles and work contexts.
Weighing your career interests and preferences (Session 3)
Next, we’ll work together to define your career preferences well, and weigh them against each other to develop a well-ordered and detailed list of career options. We’ll work with you to weigh your top career preferences against each other to determine the most important values and career skills you want to utilize in your new role.
Creative conversation to brainstorm career options (Session 4)
We now have a strong model of you: the personality traits, strengths, and career skills that inform a well-described set of your career preferences. Next, we’ll guide you in creative conversation to generate as many different career options as we can based on your top career criteria.
We’ll work directly on generating ideas for career options. We’ll also coach you to have conversations with other people who know you well, so that they can reflect your strengths back to you and help you identify more potential career contexts and roles that would be a great fit for you.
Utilizing the best career analysis and technology (Session 4)
The last assessment we’ll complete with you is a career interest inventory, developed through decades of studies, that links career satisfaction to six occupational themes:
- Realistic
- Investigative
- Artistic
- Social
- Enterprising, and
- Conventional
Based on how you score on these dimensions, we’ll coach you on using a multifactor search engine that will output a detailed list of role options for you to consider in your job search. This analysis takes the most current industry trends and market outlooks into consideration to give you the most viable options for careers you are most compatible with.
Using AI for career exploration (Session 4)
Using generative AI for career exploration is an idea that might take some adjustment.
But when we’re able to feed Google Bard and ChatGPT with the clear preferences and career criteria we’ve developed with you, the output these AI tools create can be invaluable to further inform your career decision-making process.
Discovering the top career options for you (Session 4)
Now that we have your preferences weighted against each other and a strong list of career options to consider, it’s time to evaluate, prioritize, and condense those options to the most compatible career paths for you. We’ll weigh each of your career options against your strong preferences using a mix of intuition and logic to hone your consideration to the top options.
At this point, you’ll have a chance to reflect on the top options, and you’ll likely feel a big sense of relief and excitement to jump into the next phase of this career decision-making process.
Career planning to move you forward on your path (Session 5 and beyond)
At this point, we’ll coach you on networking: how to activate your own network and connect with ours. You’ll also research the most compatible roles that come up in our exploration process. Then we’ll come back together to create a plan to get you into that new role or career path.
We’ll work with you to consider several steps toward making this career transition, including:
- Building experience
- Informational interviews and networking
- Strategic volunteering
- Getting credentials
- Going back to school
- Attending relevant programs
We’ll be with you every step of the way to make sure you move confidently forward on your career path. We can also evaluate whether you want additional support on your job search.
Move forward on a career path that fits who you are
The Career Exploration and Career Decision-Making
Coaching Package is offered by:
Career Transition Coaches
Dan Hahn, M.S.
Dan uses a systematic approach to career discovery that identifies each client’s unique strengths and matches them to job roles. He helps clients get unstuck and develop strategies to blaze realistic and profitable paths forward.
Dan is a good fit if you: prefer a down to earth blend of intuition and logic.
Dana Zacks, MSW, MPH
Dana provides a blend of career transition and psychotherapy. She brings with her a background in helping people through life changing events, with many years of experience working with oncology patients and their families.
Dana is a good fit if you: are recovering from a toxic work environment and/or are grappling with high levels of stress and anxiety.
Ursina Teuscher, Ph.D.
Ursina has been helping people make difficult decisions about their careers for twenty years. She finds success in methodically evaluating options to add clarity to people’s career decisions.
Ursina is a good fit if you: you are not sure if you should stay in your current position or want to explore other career options.
