Career Weaver

The exercises in Career Weaver provide a structured approach, a vocabulary and a variety of working methods to help you explore, name and describe your personal work-related drivers. The exercises are grouped in three areas.

What I love

Investigate the values and work preferences that underpin your intuitions, decisions and life satisfaction, both inside and outside work. Your core drivers provide the foundations for your choices, successes and frustrations, so it is powerful and enabling if you can name and take full ownership of these.

What I am good at

Taking time to understand your true strengths and skills helps you to:

• be confident about what you already do well and what you want to do in future
• create focused goals for your personal development
• learn how to present your story and showcase your abilities in order to make persuasive applications for the positions to which you aspire.

Why I do it

Bringing together the insights about ‘what you love’ and ‘what you are good at’ with ideas about what really motivates you will help you to understand and explain ‘why’ you enjoy what you enjoy doing and what underpins your commitment and success. Being clearer about ‘why’ will help you to:

• evaluate options and make better decisions based on what is most important to you and your likely long-term satisfaction
• explain clearly and succinctly how you like to work, what underpins your successes and why you enjoy doing the things you choose to do, and
• create clear and well supported job applications or suggestions for your growth and development at work.

Career Weaver was developed by the University of Oxford Careers Service and can be used by staff, students and alumni of the University. It can be used on mobile devices as well as laptops and desktop computers.

Users sign in on the Career Weaver Homepage.

• Current staff and students can access their account by signing in with their University Single Sign On (SSO)
• Oxford University alumni who matriculated will need to request a Career Weaver account. To do this, alumni must log into their CareerConnect account and send a request via the Query tab.

Graduating students can change their Career Weaver account to a personal account before their university SSO access is withdrawn. To do this, click the “User” icon on any Career Weaver screen (it’s next to the login/logout icon), and then click the blue “Convert account” button on the next screen. This allows you to enter a personal email address and create a new password. Note: you will be able to switch your account to another email address, but it will not be possible to convert your account back to the original university account.

Career Weaver is a flexible resource offering a dozen exercises. There is no set ‘route’ to follow and we encourage users to explore the site and start with whichever exercise looks most interesting or relevant, and take it from there.

Most exercises should take only 5-15 minutes, although two or three can be explored in much more depth. You can save your progress as you work and return to complete or retake exercises later. In fact, rather than crunching through the exercises in one sitting, we recommend you use Career Weaver over a number of visits. It is a good idea:

• to pause between exercises for reflection and review
• to re-visit exercises over time and up-date your thoughts as you gain experience
• to review or retake exercises you have already completed as you develop new insights.

Most exercises are grouped on the homepage under three main headings, with some additional exercises accessed via the dashboard. The main headings are:

• Values and Work Preferences
• Strengths and Skills
• Motivations.

The exercises use a variety of approaches to help you make and rate your own choices. We hope that whatever your preferred learning style, you will find some of the exercises interesting and enjoyable.

Please note the following points as you get started:

• there is no recommended order for using the exercises – start with what seems most interesting to you
• there are no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers for any of these exercises
• you do not have to take every exercise – some users may find that using only two or three exercises will be enough to uncover valuable and actionable insights
• different exercises can overlap, so:
  • insights from different sources might reinforce each other, or challenge your current thinking or assumptions
  • people with different working styles may find some exercises or ways of thinking more accessible.

The challenge for each one of us is to use the information and insights revealed through these exercises to understand our own personal pattern of career drivers and apply this thoughtfully to make better work-related choices.

Career Weaver provides a parallel and complementary set of insights to help you understand why different options might be a good fit for you, and begin to articulate this clearly for yourself and through stronger job applications. Users who complete at least one exercise from each of the three areas defined on the landing page will unlock an extra, concluding exercise: Seeing your pattern. This is accessed from the dashboard and can be used to pull together the different threads within Career Weaver. Use it to further clarify your thinking about what’s most important to you and how you can best present this to others.

However, Career Weaver does not provide recommendations or suggestions about which careers or jobs might be a good personal fit. To start investigating and identifying specific career direction(s), we recommend starting with the following resources:

• read the guidance on Generating Career Ideas. This reinforces the important of reflection alongside exploring the external labour market. You will also find some ​​​External Resources which you can use to extend and deepen your personal reflection, many of which also offer career-match recommendations
• look at our Sector and Occupations briefings
• see the advice on the variety of ways to research and find work opportunities, accessed from Job Search Strategies
• use the additional links and guidance suggested on our Useful Career Resources page.

Additionally, matriculated students and recent alumni can arrange to see a Careers Adviser for an impartial and confidential discussion of their Career Weaver profile and their emerging career ideas.