Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center

About This Product

Learn more about this product at our live webcast:

Career Readiness at the Public Library: Infobase Resources for the Entire Community
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Take a quick look at the overview video for Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center:

Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center is an award-winning reference database for lifelong career exploration and planning. It offers a wealth of resources for users to assess their career goals and interests, plan their education, learn workplace skills, find apprenticeships and internships, conduct a job search, and much more. It provides users with clean, fast access to core content; a fully responsive design; a seamless multimedia experience; unparalleled, up-to-date information; proprietary directories of apprenticeships and internships; and financial aid and school search databases.

For students choosing a career path, graduates entering the workforce, or professionals changing careers, Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center supports users at every step of their career journey.

Highlights:

• Explore Careers: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center features expertly researched, detailed content, including video interviews, on more than 140 industries and more than 1,000 professions, with current information on earnings, employment trends, job requirements, and essential skills using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, professional associations and unions, industry reports, and working professionals. The fastest-growing, highest-paying, most in-demand, and most extraordinary jobs are each highlighted, and new articles on emerging professions, such as artificial intelligence specialists, blockchain developers, and remote health care engineers, are added regularly. More than 230 proprietary video interviews with working professionals are integrated into the professions articles to provide firsthand, on-the-job information.
• Plan Your Education: This section contains valuable content on education planning, including a School Search, two comprehensive financial aid databases, and advice articles and videos. Users can find the schools that are the best fit—choosing from undergraduate, graduate, and vocational and tech schools in the U.S. and Canada, and narrowing their list by location, enrollment, tuition, areas of study, and other characteristics. Financial aid information is organized into two current databases of grants and scholarships—those offered by schools and those by private organizations—and is also integrated into the school profile pages.
• Prepare for Your Career: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center offers expert advice articles and videos on writing résumés and cover letters, interviewing, networking, and other workplace topics. Users can download sample résumés and cover letters in Word and PDF formats to use as templates to build their own. A special section on networking features 12 articles, written by networking expert Miriam Salpeter, that discuss what networking is (and what it isn’t), how to identify and understand exactly who is in your network, how to manage your online presence and use social topics in a job search, how to make cold calls and handle follow-up, how to maintain and manage your network even after you have a job, and more. This section also includes helpful Career Tips videos that provide essential advice.
• Find a Career: Find a job with Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center’s current, searchable, live job postings. For patrons interested in pursuing an internship or apprenticeship, the proprietary directories, advice articles, and videos in Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center offer unmatched content. The Apprenticeship Directory contains thousands of programs with opportunities in every state for more than 50 career fields. Exclusive articles discuss the ins and outs of apprenticeships in each field. The Internship Directory offers more than 660 programs. All directory records discuss the nature of the opportunity, requirements, where and how to apply, and more.
• Videos: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center contains more than 590 tablet/mobile-friendly videos and clips covering jobs, industries, and career development skills, accessible via the Career Videos landing page and throughout the database. The Career Q&A: Professional Advice and Insight  videos let users get a no-nonsense insider’s perspective from working professionals across multiple industries, including biologists, mobile software developers, FBI agents, museum curators, criminal lawyers, aerospace engineers, and more. The Career Tips video series offers concise, timely advice on job-search techniques and career skills such as writing better résumés and cover letters, networking, interviewing, and advancing your career.
• Essential Resources for Workplace Skill Building: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center’s exclusive workplace skills development content can help users prepare for a career in any field and support academic success and general life skills. The extensive section on workplace skills offers in-depth units with tips and exercises for understanding and mastering all-important “soft skills”: communication skills, organizational skills, problem-solving skills, and more. These skills, considered essential by all employers, are often cited as lacking in many new employees and young people entering the workforce.
• Specialized Advice and Resources: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center provides advice articles for minorities, people with disabilities, and women seeking to launch and advance their career. These articles discuss education and workplace issues specific to each group with advice for finding solutions for them. Each category includes a directory of selected top resources for finding aid, support, and more information.
• Career Advice Blog: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center features regular new blog posts “From Our Career Experts,” with an archive of more than 2,400  posts on topics such as job searching, workplace issues, interviewing, networking, résumés and cover letters, and salary and benefits.
• Career Interest Assessment: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center’s Career Interest Assessment allows users to identify their work-interest areas and match them to possible careers. The two assessment options—60 questions or 30 questions—measure a user’s artistic, conventional, enterprising, investigative, realistic, and social interests and link the results to key Professions articles so users can explore professions that match their interests. 
• Authoritative Source List: Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center features a complete inventory of the extraordinary amount of content in the database, including titles from Ferguson’s renowned Careers in Focus series and the Encyclopedia of Careers and Vocational Guidance.

Features:

• Fully responsive and mobile friendly—will work on all desktop, mobile, and tablet devices
• Persistent record links
• Dynamic citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats
• Option to add institution logo/name to the top of each page
• Read Aloud tool
• Google Translate for 100+ languages
• Searchable Support Center with valuable help materials, how-to tips, tutorials, and live help chat.