By FAB Futures

Career Coach is an excellent tool to conduct research and plan career and education pathways. It also has LMI embedded and with regular use becomes personalised to the user. There is a brief but informative video on the Career Coach Homepage. We’ll touch on what LMI is later.

Career Coach can be found on the college VLE.

If you haven’t done so already, just click on the icon and this will take you to Career Coach where you can ‘sign up’.

Career Coach has four elements to it and these four elements will help you greatly when planning your career.

Career Assessments

This is a great place to start if you are not sure which career to follow. You can take the ‘Quick start assessment’ for a brief insight into what to aim for. You can then progress to a ‘Standard assessment’ then the ‘Detailed assessment’, for more specific results and I recommend this assessment as it provides more informed results.

You should answer each question as honestly as you can. Once complete, the assessment results will present your top three traits along with an explanation of each, and how they relate to aspects of careers. A list of career industries in ‘best match’ order is also displayed. These industries are then broken down into careers.

Browse Careers

Career Coach will present you with research on specific jobs by keywords, or by industry area (this provides more career options), for example; searching for ‘healthcare’ will throwback nurse, midwives, healthcare managers and healthcare practice managers. Information on the careers includes: an overview of the job, salary information, relevant skills, employment trends, relevant live job postings and similar careers. This of course, is referred to as LMI and can be the information you base your potential career choice on.

Browse Courses

This section will provide you the opportunity to search Wigan & Leigh College’s courses for more information on the course and careers it may lead to. This will be ideal if you are thinking of changing course the following year to progress elsewhere in the College.

CV Builder

This section will help you create your CV section by section. It has a search facility to find the jobs or work experience you have already undertaken and lists the main tasks, as well as the option to add custom tasks. This really does make it an easy-to-use tool. Once completed, the CV can be downloaded to Microsoft Word to save for future use, editing and updating.

What is Labour Market Information?

LMI or Labour Market Information is any relevant information about the current state of the jobs market. LMI can be national or regional information to demystify the world of work and can help you realise your goals. LMI provides the knowledge and understanding of how the job market works and is a useful and important tool for making sense of it all. In essence – reflecting upon what the future holds. LMI can include information such as:

• The industries and businesses that operate in a certain location The types of jobs that exist and what they involve – daily tasks etc
• Specific job skills
• Wages/salaries
• Whether jobs are increasing or declining within specific industries
• Future retirements which can indicate new jobs becoming available.

Using LMI is a great way of helping you decide a career direction as it can give a good picture as to whether a certain job or industry will provide you with the job opportunities and satisfaction you want.

What are the benefits of LMI?

Skills - LMI identifies the skills employers are looking for that are specific to your chosen industry or career. Knowing these skills and securing relevant work experience can help you to be job application and interview ready as well as ready for the world of work.

Job overview - LMI describes the day-to-day tasks needed for your chosen career. Getting to know this helps with making and reaffirming career decisions providing good career insights. It also helps you understand the job role which in turn helps to talk about it during applications and interviews.

Money - LMI identifies the salaries you can expect at various stages on your career pathway. An awareness of potential earnings may provide an incentive, or peace of mind and can go a long way in confirming career choices.

Check out our website for a look at LMI for Greater Manchester:

https://www.wigan-leigh.ac.uk/services-students/fab-futures/careers