Tools and tips for facilitators and helpers

Want to help people with career planning or job search but don't know where to start? Get tips on how to approach these topics and find useful tools including videos, exercises, interactive tools, quizzes and links to key sources of information.

What's on this page?

Career planning

A teacher helps two students with robotics

Helping people to identify their skills is a good starting point for career planning and job hunting

To help with career planning, follow these three stages:

encourage self-awareness – help people reflect and think about themselves
explore the options – use job-matching tools for ideas, and use our databases and job profiles
encourage goal-setting and action-planning.

Encourage self-awareness

Helping people to be more self-aware can better prepare them to make choices about their next steps, and whether they will be a good fit with their skills, interests and values.

Use job-matching tools for ideas

Use job-matching tools to help people generate ideas if they are still uncertain about the direction they want to take. Use listening skills and clarifying questions when discussing career ideas. Act as a sounding board, and ask people to explain their choices when talking things through.

Tools to help you:

Search our databases for key information

You don’t need to be an expert – you just have to know where to go to find out information. Our job profiles and courses database can help you search for information about entry requirements for jobs, the job market, and courses.

Tools to help you:

Encourage goal-setting and action-planning

Help people to identify next steps, keep track and meet their goals. Use action plans and checklists to help them work out what they need to do, and by when.

Tools to help you:

Dealing with challenges

For some people, real or perceived challenges can be a barrier when looking for work or making career decisions. To help them clarify these challenges and make it easier to identify and take steps to deal with them, you can use these Challenges card sorts.

CV preparation and job search

Effective job search comes down to helping people sell themselves well. That means helping them identify what they can say about themselves, and targeting their applications appropriately to jobs.

Focus on skills and achievements first

The hardest part for many people is identifying the skills they can offer employers. Do this before getting into the specifics of CV writing. Help your students reflect on what they have done during their course or training. Work experience, voluntary work and assignments can all contribute.

Help people target their CVs

Use sample job advertisements and role definitions to help identify what the employer is looking for and how a CV should be written to reflect it. Look for key words in job descriptions and help them use those in their CV. You can usually download role definitions from job vacancy websites.

The job descriptions from our job profiles can also help give ideas.

Try critiquing a sample of CVs

Try an exercise where people select from a sample of CVs and decide which is the best.

Use your networks

Use your networks to bring in employers to talk about the employer's point of view about CVs. Ask them what makes a good CV.

Help with writing a CV:

Job hunting preparation:

Job vacancies:

Ways of working and rights at work:

Interview preparation

The best way to prepare for an interview is to practise – and that means getting people to answer questions. Role plays and mock interview questions are a helpful way of getting people prepared.

If you can, follow up on how each interview went and encourage reflection on it to help next time around.