Focus 2 Career Logo
Focus 2 Career for Beginning and Continuing Career Exploration

Beginning career exploration can be overwhelming. There’s so many directions to go and how do you know where to start when you’re still trying to learn who you are as a person?

An easy step one is using Focus 2 Career. This site helps students personalize their career and education plans, with specialized information based on the programs Augsburg offers. Students must register for an account using access code: auggiecareers. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to register.

Quick Start

Looking to get started right away? Watch this video from Focus 2 to better understand what’s available on the site or continue reading below for a written, step-by-step walk-through.

Career Planning Foundations

Focus 2 Career has three career planning evaluations to help students begin their college and career experience. The first, My Career Planning Involvement, tracks a student’s self assessment, career exploration, and career planning satisfaction and provides recommendations to grow or sustain their current planning. My Academic Strengths surveys what the student excels at and helps them discover what might be a good path of study for them at the university. Am I Career Ready? asks students to consider their career readiness skills, based off of NACE’s career readiness proficiencies. All three of these evaluations allow students to review their results and receive recommendations for how to improve. They can also retake the evaluations in the future to see how they change over time.

A screen shot of Focus2Career's personalized portal with three evaluation and five self assessment options.

Assessements

There are five self assessments students can take on Focus 2 Career:

  • Work Interest Assessment: Based off of Holland Codes, a personality assessment that considers how your personality might shape what work you do, this assessment helps students isolate their top three areas of interest from six career areas – social, artistic, investigative, enterprising, realistic, and conventional. Focus2Career then uses those results to provide occupation that match the student’s results and include what majors would be suitable for that career path.
Screen shot of "occupations matching your results" from Focus2Career webpage. It includes information on art, drama, and music careers, majors/program of study for those career pathways, the mean salary of those fields, and the job salary of the occupation.
  • Personality assessment: Similar to Strengthfinders, this assessment provides information on how a student approaches not just work but life in general. After completing the assessment, the student will be provided five or so descriptions of their personality along with careers that may reflect their results. For example. if a student receives the results that they “approach work and life with a positive concern about people,” they may be recommended to look at occupations that value psychological well being and physical health. Students will also be provided five adjectives that describe their personality and specific occupations listed on O*NET that fit those descriptors.
Screen shot of personality assessment results from the Focus2Career website. It shows five bullet points about a person's personality and advice on choosing a career based upon this information.
  • Leisure assessment: similar to the personality assessment, this inventory asks the student what they enjoy doing in their free time. The assessment then uses these results to provide input into how these activities might inform a career path.
  • Values assessment: After a student selects their top three values from a selected list, Focus 2 Career provides a list of occupations based on those values.
  • Skills assessment: After choosing their three top skills from choices that include communication, people, problem solving, management, creative, scientific, and technical skills, students will be provided occupations that align with their top skills.

Focus 2 Career also has a combined assessment option so that students can view occupations that appeared on any number of the assessments they completed.

Explore Possibilities

Focus 2 Career features five options for further exploration:

  • What can I do with a major in…Offered at Augsburg University?
  • What can I do if I majored in…?
  • Explore any Occupation
  • Explore Occupations by Job Family
  • Compare 2 Occupations Side by Side

This allows students to investigate further into their choices after taking the assessments.

Take Action

Perhaps one of the most valuable features of Focus 2 Career are the roadmap options for education and professional development. These serve as organizational databases for students to track development in the following areas:

  • General education; study abroad; awards, research, publications and/or presentations; campus involvement in teams, clubs and other leadership
  • Career objectives and goals; internship (past, present, and future); work experience (past, present, and future); volunteer/community experience; network of contacts; social networking and professional memberships; resumes, cover letters, and other documents

This digital portfolio can help students track their progress and describe/reflect up on their experiences, in preparation for future applications or simply to have a space to collect their work.

Planning Results

Screen shot of Focus2Career's planning results options, which include: My Saved Occupations, My Saved Majors, and Review and Print My Portfolio

After completing all of the previously mentioned assessments and road mapping, students can review any occupations or majors they’ve bookmarked and view their portfolio overall. By printing their portfolio, they can have a physical copy of their work on Focus2Careers that can be shared with mentors, staff, or faculty or used in preparation for job interviews.

Why Use Focus 2 Career?

We think the benefits of using this site speak for themselves, however we can’t help but list them here for you:

  • Can be used by anyone at any stage of their education or career planning
  • Easily provides a variety of assessments in once place and allows the use to compare their results with possible areas of study and occupations
  • Allows users to track their progress, retake assessments, and create a digital portfolio of their accomplishments and contacts
  • Results can be downloaded and shared with faculty, mentors, career coaches, advisors, friends – whoever!

We envision this resource being used across campus in a variety of ways, particularly in our career center by our coaches during sessions with students. We’d also recommend this resource be used in Aug Sems for introducing personal and professional development, by advisors helping students pick a major, and by mentors who want to see where their mentees are at in terms of career readiness. We’re open to more ideas as well and happy to help walk student, faculty, and staff through using the platform!