What should 6th years be doing now?

For 6th year students considering their course or career path options after the Leaving Cert next June, starting your research early is crucial. You may be lucky enough to still have career guidance in school even though funding was removed in 2012, or you nay have none. Either way, you have to do most of the groundwork yourself, as you’ll only a session or two with any guidance counsellor. You need a plan of action for a clear set of options next June.

Over 25,000 students spent a day at the Irish Times/Institute Guidance Counsellors Higher Options conference last month or regional versions of it, as well as college open days.

You may be overwhelmed by the choices facing you at this stage. How do you make sense of them? Over 80 per cent of students seek a third level place through the CAO application process. Several thousand apply for a place in the UK or Northern Ireland through Ucas, and a growing number apply for courses taught through English in European universities.

Over 10,000 current year Leaving Certs will seek places on post leaving certificate programmes. With the economy and the construction industry showing signs of recovery, opportunities for apprenticeships are bound to improve in the coming year. The Government recently established an industry-led group chaired by Solas, to review and expand apprenticeships to meet the needs of high technology industry.

Many websites have information on courses in Ireland either within the CAO system, in NI colleges offered through Ucas or in PLC programmes.

According to an Irish Universities Quality Board survey 25 per cent of students explore a range of university and IT websites, 49 per cent use the CAO website, but by far the greatest number, 84 per cent of students, do their course searches on qualifax.ie.

How to

use Qualifax. ie Qualifax is Ireland's national courses database,

managed by Quality Qualifications Ireland (QQI) on behalf of the DES, and is free to all users. On your first visit to Qualifax, create your own account to store and retrieve any work.

Then click on the student section on the tool bar, to get a choice of 25 options, ranging from accommodation to time management. On the left hand side of the screen are nine options, including a section on how to get the most out of the site.

The main interest for students is the course search facility which allows Leaving Cert students to choose between higher education CAO or PLC courses.

Choosing either brings you to a search screen, which is the heart of the Qualifax system. The advanced search allows you to enter a range of key words, and look for them in both the title and course literature of every course offered through the system. There are 13 other filters to narrow down the search. You can filter by county, prospective entry points requirements, by college etc.

After narrowing down the search to a specific list of courses, explore each by clicking on the course name, for over 30 fields of data on each, including content and subjects.

Qualifax is updated daily so any course changes are amended online. It is amazing that each year thousands of students abandon courses and drop out of college, because they did not know about the subject matter on the programme, which is available at the click of a mouse.

How to use Careers

Portal.ie All courses ultimately lead

to career choices, and the careersportal.ie website. Owned and managed by Durrow Communications, Careers portal is funded by public and private bodies and is free to use, though schools can buy additional features. This website is a superb source of quality labour market information letting students explore career options and apply the information to their skills and interests.

As with Qualifax, the first thing to do on Careers Portal is sign up and create your own career file. This gives access to career exercises and allows you to store research, such as interest inventories and personality profiler test results, online. It saves lists of courses and occupations of interest, and anything useful you come across .

The Interest Profiler helps you find a general career direction, leading you through a list of 56 choices between different occupations, which results in a career interest profile showing strength of interest in seven fields, creative, social, administrative, practical etc.

The Personality Profiler aims to identify temperament, and suggests some typical characteristics and careers that ‘fit’ your personality.

The Career Notepad can store anything you write into it, such as to-do lists, a CV, course/career details and so on. Its toolbox gives access to the main search areas you are likely to need, courses, occupations, career sectors and so on.

Careers Portal breaks the world of work into over 30 career sectors, with information on each. Select the sectors link on the main menu for lists of courses, sample occupations and career and course videos. Become familiar with the different career opportunities and ask yourself if you are interested in the sector, if you can see yourself in particular jobs or would enjoy working in the area.

Careers Portal has information on 900 occupations, with videos and interviews from Irish workers, plus over 1,500 links to online videos and resources. Look at some of the videos and think about whether there’s a good fit between the work and your career interests/personality, is the pay reasonable, what qualifications or courses you would need.

Brian Mooney's new book Start Your Career Journey Here is published by the Education Company. revisewise.ie, €9.95.

Note the dates

The Institute of Guidance Counsellors’ calendar has career related events, open days and application dates. It’s probably on your school guidance counsellor’s noticeboard and is also on Qualifax.ie. Careersportal.ie has a similar service.

To apply for for Oxford or Cambridge, or for medicine, dentistry or veterinary in the UK, submit applications at ucas.com by October 15th. Only 25 RoI applicants got medicine through Ucas this year.

Application dates vary for EU universities, starting this month, and there is no central application system. Details on unicas.ie, which also offers support to applicants to EU colleges for €28.

For college in the US or further afield, make initial contact this month, as applications can be complex. You need to sit the SAT test, through collegeboard.org. See Education USA section of the Fulbright foundation website fulbright.ie.