Self-reflection toolkit

Self-reflection will help you identify the things that matter to you most in choosing a career. Try to answer the questions above but remember not to overthink your answers or put yourself under pressure to 'get it right'. Your thoughts and ideas are likely to change in the future. The objective here is just to think about what interests, skills and values matter to you the most now.

  • What am I good at? - think about your strengths
  • What am I interested in? - think about topics as well as tasks
  • What’s important to me? - think about your values

Self-Reflection Toolkit

At any stage in your career thinking, the Self-Reflection Toolkit in Handshake will help you to reflect on past experiences, your skills and motivations in order to move forward in planning your next steps. You can use one or all of these resources at any time and we recommend that you revisit them either termly or annually as part of your career development plan.

  • My Experiences: Looking backwards to help me move forwards. This activity will help you to look back at the activities and experiences you’ve been involved with so far to start working out what you’d like in a future career.

  • Self Assessment – Skills audit. This skills audit resource is to help you recognise your skills and which you enjoy using. You can identify skills you need to, or would like to, work on and plan a skills development strategy to achieve your career goals.

  • Career Interests and Motivation: What’s important to me about work? This activity allows you to identify and prioritise what factors are important to you in your next steps after Cambridge.These ‘work factors’ will be unique to you and may change over time so it’s worth revisiting from time to time

Personality questionnaires

You may also like to try a personality questionnaire. These can help signpost careers you might be suited to and provide a useful starting point. To begin, you must access this through Handshake - see the Profiling for Success resource. Once logged in to Profiling for Success, you will be presented with a list of resources to choose from.

The two questionnaires below are particularly valuable in helping you look for new career ideas:

Types Dynamic Indicator

The Types Dynamic Indicator will help you get to know your preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. This can be useful in helping you choose the kind of role you might be good at and enjoy. The Types Dynamic Indicator is based on the Myers-Briggs personality questionnaire which some organisations use in the workplace. It takes 10-15 mins and you’ll receive a personalised report.

Values Based Indicator of Motivation

The Values Based Indicator of Motivation is another useful tool which helps you identify those things that matter to you most when choosing a career. It takes about 10-15 mins and you’ll receive a personalised report.