Job Sectors

A job sector is a group of jobs that all share common characteristics. They are sometimes called occupational sectors, or occupational areas, and Connexions Direct refers to them as job families. In the same way that an apple, banana and orange belong to the food group known as fruit, so a fitness instructor, poolguard and travel agent beling to the job family known as Leisure, Sport and Tourism. A job sector is therefore very similar to a job family, but you will find slightly different categories if you look into them more carefully.

Knowing about job sectors can help you work out the kinds of jobs you want to do later on. Rather than trying to focus on a specific occupation you can look at a general area of jobs that all have things in common, then narrow down later. So, if you are creative you could check out Connexions Direct's 'Design, Art and Crafts' section to read about the 27 jobs highlighted in this job family. Or look at the 67 jobs in the Engineering section. There are 23 job families in all on Connexions Direct Jobs4u pages.

The links on these pages take you to individual websites for each of the job sectors that exist. A Sector Skills Council oversees each sector so the name of the website will normally be the same as the SSC for that sector. Try not to become confused between job sectors and job families - the key difference about a SSC is that it has a much bigger role to provide information about the jobs it covers, whereas Connexions Direct Jobs4u is presenting information mainly for young people with the aim of telling you about different jobs.

You do not need to know about SSCs if you just want to find out what different job families exist and what each job within a family involves. Jobs4u is an excellent site that gives you all the basic information you need to work out if you want to go for a certain occupation. However, if you want to know more detail about a sector - perhaps read about some employers or the type of work major companies in that sector are involved in at the moment - then you may want to check out the SSC websites.

SSCs aim to improve the skills levels of people who are employed in the sectors they cover, as well as trying to predict what the future skills needs of the sectors will be. The SSCs also set occupational standards for the jobs they cover which involves setting out the kinds of things young people would learn in Apprenticeships, at college and at university. This means the courses you learn would have been put together partly by the SSC covering that sector. The reason this is done is because SSCs are led by employers and they are the people who know what young people should be learning to prepare them for a career in their sector.

You can see all SSC websites in the links tab, but broadly speaking the sectors cover most of the career areas you can think of. A few examples include Cogent Skills (eg, chemicals, nuclear, oil and gas), e-skills (eg, software, internet and IT services), Lantra (eg, environmental and landbased), People 1st (eg, hotel and leisure industry), Skills for Justice (eg, fire, police, forensics) and Summitskills (eg, building services engineering). You won't need to look at them all, just research those SSCs where the jobs appeal to you and you'd like to find out more.

It can be confusing when faced with lots of information about job sectors to try to work out which sector is right for you. Try not to worry too much about that - ask any adult if they are doing the job now that they wanted to do when they were at school and nearly all will say 'no'! One thing that might help you is a computerised career interest guide like Kudos or JED. These online guides can ask you questions about your likes/dislikes, strengths/weaknesses etc and come up with a list of job suggestions. Nobody is saying these are the things you must do, but they could point you in the right direction. Ask your Connexions PA for more information about online career guides.