Everyone sometimes needs a helping hand – a friend or helper who can guide you along a tricky path. The Occupational Outlook Handbook is just the helper you might need as you prepare to enter the real world.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics updates this online tool each year to show growth in careers, to provide info on new careers, and to detail salaries of careers. A wide array of jobs and careers are listed on the site. There are five key things to look for when navigating the site:

• It will tell you the earning potential of these jobs
• It will tell you what is the training and education needed for these jobs
• It will outline future job prospects
• It will tell you what workers do on the job
• It will tell you about the working conditions

You can use the information you find on the site to help you understand where your interests and strengths lie as you decide on a career path. Reading this information will help you figure out the type of person you are.

Because there's so much information on the site, it can be a little daunting or confusing. It can also be hard to stay on track because it's so interesting. Clicking from one thing to the next can cause you to get pulled in so many directions. With a little bit of practice, you will be able to move around the site with ease and view this site as a valuable resource.

There are three ways to start your journey or search on the site. The first one should sound pretty familiar to you. Just like with Google or any other search engine, you can type in a job or an occupation in the search box at the top right hand corner. Another way is to go through the listed jobs in alphabetic order and click on the occupation that interests you. The final way is to click the major categories on the left side of the site and casually browse through the jobs within each category.

Say for instance if you just clicked a letter and wanted to scroll through all the job titles and occupations under that letter. You will find that there will be quite a few options under that letter. Unless for instance if you click X or Z – there most likely won't be as many as some of the other letters. But if you clicked N, you might find hundreds of options just with nurse or nursing in the title.

When you click on one of the titles, you will be sent to a new page with info about the position, average compensation, job outlook, related occupations, etc. You will also see that there are a number of links that you can click to give you even more detailed information. Reading this information will help you realize why you want to be in nursing in the first place.

As you can see, the Occupational Outlook Handbook is a handy dandy tool that will help you figure out what career is right for you.