If you don’t know what you want to know, you will have no way of starting your research into different job opportunities – you just won’t have a clue where to begin! So the next activity is designed to help you identify a few questions that you want answered. At this stage, these sorts of question might be useful:
Which of these questions are most important to you right now? Your answer might depend on how clear you are about the type of work you want, your motivations for pursuing the work and the time frames you have in mind. For example, if you are already in work but short of money, you might want to look for additional work that fits around your existing job. In this case you would be more concerned with the availability of work and with the practicalities, such as weekend or evening working options. If, however, you are already on a career path but considering a different employment sector, you might have questions about organisation types and availability in your area.
To help you decide what questions to ask, in the next activity you’re going to look again at Christopher’s situation.
Allow about 15 minutes
Christopher has decided that he wants to pursue the idea of becoming a car mechanic. Consider what questions you think he needs to ask, which are related to:
This is not a full set of the questions that could be asked, but it illustrates how using the different question categories can help you to identify useful questions to explore.
Use these ideas for questions when you think about your own situation in the next activity.
Allow about 25 minutes
Remind yourself of the three sources of information you chose in Activity 9, and identify three questions you think it might be helpful for you to answer. Use the types of question listed above to prompt your thinking. For example, you might have listed ‘National Office of Statistics’ as one of the sources you will consider. If so, your questions could be as follows:
You will see that the questions here are largely about availability. However, the type of question you ask will be related to the source that you are consulting – consider this carefully when constructing your own questions.
Now go to the template for this activity in the resource pack and note down the information sources you chose and the questions you think will guide your research. The table below provides an example of how to organise your thoughts.
Information source | My three questions |
---|---|
Food bank website |
Are there any food banks close to my home? Is it possible to get to them by bus? What sort of work do they ask volunteers to do? |
You are refining your ideas as you work through this process. At this point you should feel pleased with your progress. You already have:
Now you have a list of questions, you can start to research what you want to know.
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