A Career Services ToolKit

Ministry Career Planning:

Self-Assessment and Inventory Workbook

2024-25

Greetings and Welcome:

The purpose of these questions is to help gain insight into your vocational discernment journey. What is your inspiration? What are your learning goals – formal and informal, and your knowledge and facility with career and job search tools and strategies — that is, the weave of Inspiration/Calling, Learning, Career/Vocation?

In our journey together, we aim towards a process that will offer:

• clarity in the skills,
• confidence in the ability to portray your vocational vision,
• and certainty in the ways in which you might apply your charisms and talents in a meaningful way as you develop a pathway to your ministry or pastoral practice.

As we begin, we would like to offer a few introductory thoughts which ground and frame our approach:

• We clearly want to present this to you as a set of offerings and invitations and not some kind of checklist or a basis for judgment.
• The weave of Inspiration/Calling, Learning, and Career/Vocation is selective and entirely the choice of each individual student within the CTU community.
• We would like these questions to generate a whole lot of ideas but also serve as a mechanism for choosing a few important ones for focus, effort, and delivery.
• We offer these questions to you as warm, embracing, and welcoming invitations for exploration and inquiry, and not as opportunities for judgment nor cause for stress or anxiety; we are all just where we need to be at this moment.
• We seek to develop containers of deep trust “within, across and beyond” the CTU and Career Services for the Ministry Team for this work and journey together.
• In our work, we have a rule which we share publicly: “No Pressure.”
• We do want to engage you in seeking an ever-expanding horizon of what is possible in your vocational discernment. The demand for professionally trained pastoral leaders, ethicists and ministers is rapidly growing across the Church, nonprofits, and even in the business arena.
• These words of Verlyn Klingenborg offer some additional reflection

The purpose of these questions isn’t to construct a theory,

A hypothesis about how or why …

The purpose is to help you notice the shape of what lies before you.

The answers to these questions may be nothing more than

Noticing the effect of asking them.

The accompanying questions and self-directed “conversation of inquiry” are organized into five general areas for self-reflection and discernment:

• This Assessment and Inventory offers a broad set of questions for self-reflection, conversation, observation, and journaling, as well as a tactical approach to the career development process. It also serves as a preliminary survey and inventory to inform where we are at this moment in the journey.
• Together, the reflections and answers to these questions will begin to shape what might become a series of next steps in your collaboration with CTU’s Career Services for Ministry Team. We hope that this dialogue fosters a co-creative and co-participatory process as you plan for your future goals.
• These questions will also allow you to define areas where you can be intentional about exploring and developing throughout your graduate experience.
• Keep in mind that this is a process that you should reevaluate regularly as you proceed throughout your studies at CTU.
• Finally, we offer an open-ended question, sketch and drawing opportunity: “Summary of Your Career/Vocation Pathway”

Directions:

For each section below, reflect and provide an honest assessment of yourself, noting the following for your individual inventory and reflection.

• Check the BOX if you would like to consider some in-depth work throughout the 2025-26 academic year.
• Please mark the “Yes” checkbox at the beginning of each sentence if you feel you have “Clarity, Confidence and Certainty” regarding the question.
• You may, of course, choose to skip over a question or annotate as appropriate to you.

Once you have completed answering the questions, you are encouraged to work with either Herb Quinde or Gerald Doyle, in the Career Services Office to design and map out a manageable timeline for accomplishing these steps to ensure that you are able to secure your intended vocational and ministry career goals in advance of your commencement from CTU. In addition, you may well find that others within your sphere, a colleague, friend, classmate at CTU, or mentor might also serve as a valuable resource for your discovery and growth in these areas.

Finally, consider these goals to work toward as you move progressively through the career development process.

“There’s plenty of talk about the need for transformation in leadership work, in our vocations, and in our ministry, but transformation from what? to what? for what? And following what path? How do leaders inspire, design, enable and support these transformations, for themselves and others, and help to shape the relationships and the contexts that make them possible?”

Consider these questions as reflection for the weave to discern your inspiration/calling, to design your learning goals and to frame your vocation/career/ministry job search strategies.

Quinde, Doyle, 2025-26

Acknowledgements: Inspired by a 2013 Messiah College career center questionnaire; Managing Transitions, William Bridges, Ph.D., and 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work.