How well could you answer the following questions at a job interview?: 

• What motivates you to get out of bed every morning? 
• How have your personal values influenced your choice of career? 
• How might your personal values influence how you will go about your work? 
• When has having a clear sense of your own values helped you to make a difficult decision?
• How does having a clear sense of your own values help you to deal with change and uncertainty? 

Think you might struggle? Time to think some more about your values:  

• Our values drive our motivation and behaviour.  
• Our values drive us to go “above and beyond” by making more effort and bigger sacrifices. 
• Our values drive our efforts to attain the rewards that mean the most to us. 
• Our values can be shaped by our upbringing, personality, life history and cultural background.   

How to identify your career values

What matters to you most in a job, career or work environment? How can confident are you that you could answer that question if asked? 

It can be challenging to pinpoint your true, implicit career values when you:  

• You have not yet had a wide enough range of experiences needed to reveal your implicit value, OR 
• You have not yet reflected on your experience in order to recognise the implicit values they reveal. 

You cannot change the range of experience you have been exposed to so far, but you can choose to reflect on the experience you have gained. 

You can also choose to take a powerful self-assessment available on licence to UCC students called the Values-Based Indicator of Motivation (VBIM). 

The Values-Based Indicator of Motivation (VBIM)

The VBIM will not only empower you with the ability to describe your conscious values, it will also reveal which values are more of less important to you than you consciously realise. 

Many career values frameworks have been developed over several decades. The VBIM framework is based on a highly comprehensive framework that has been adapted to reflect the values that motivate us in the 21st Century. 

See a definition of each of these values in the following table:

To get the most from your VBIM report, we recommend that you share and discuss the report with a careers advisor in UCC Careers Services. You can book a 30 minute Remote Consultation on Connect.