There are so many students that seem to bounce from major to major, acquiring over 50 percent more credits than needed to graduate. This costs them both precious time and money. I know teens are still figuring out what they want to do and it will probably change. I have mine go through some exercises and learn skills that will help them so that they can minimize the cost of time and money by doing their research, and knowing how to do more research if they do decide to change their plans. We call this our College Prep Course, and complete it prior to starting college courses. We usually count it as a .5 credit high school elective course. If your student really gets into it and spends over 120 hours, it is good for a whole high school credit.
We begin by taking interest inventories online. This is a fun way to start. The student rates how much they might enjoy different tasks. At the end, the student is given a list of
careers that match their interests the most. Two free online sources of interest inventories are https://www.cacareerzone.org/ and https://www.mynextmove.org/explore/ip. Both ask almost identical questions, but they present their findings a little different. CA Career Zone shows a longer list of career options with the amount of education needed next to them. By clicking on them you open up more information on job outlook, expected income, and more. My Next Move has you pick the amount of education you want to complete, so the list of career choices is smaller. It also gives you the ability to click to learn more about the career, similar to the CA Career Zone, but almost every career also comes with a short video about the career. You can hit the Back button on My Next Move to pick different levels of education and get more job choices. There are other interest inventories that charge and can give you a larger list of possibilities, and this may be of interest if they have no idea, but I find that the free inventories gave my teens enough choices to get them interested in clicking on the links for similar careers and careers that came to mind while searching the others. If you do want to look or try more inventories, you can try some of the ones listed here: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/best-free-career-assessment-tools. Be aware that many of these begin as free, but offer more detailed reports for a charge at the end.
Their next step is to pick three or more of the careers that interest them and look them up in the Occupational Outlook Handbook found at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/. This gives
them information on job outlook, education needed, expected income, and other data. This may seem redundant after finding most of that information from the interest inventory, but I do it for two reasons. First, I want them to know how to find that information on any career they are interested in without needing to complete an interest inventory. Second, I like to teach them to always look up information on more than one source. The more sources they check, the more likely the information they gather is correct.
Their next responsibility is to interview someone in the careers they are interested in. I strongly encourage them to shadow someone or volunteer in that area for at least a day. Sometimes that is enough to realize a jobis
Next, they look at the colleges they are interested in and see if they offer the majors they are considering, or find other college choices. Almost every college, if not all, has a list of offered majors. Once they find the majors they are interested in at a college, they can look at the prerequisites or courses needed for those majors on the colleges' websites. By finding courses that are required for all of the majors they are considering, they can make a list of courses that will help them no matter which of the majors they choose.
I also like to evaluate how my teens are doing on skills that will help them throughout college. Usually my teens have already finished some of these, but if they have not I have them read and study The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey, learn to organize and schedule parts of their day to accomplish needed tasks and assignments, use some type of planner (can be a regular notebook), and learn keyboarding. If you would like you can add life skills such as cooking, laundry, cleaning, ect., but that can also be for a home economics course if they need work in those areas.
When teens finish this process, they feel empowered to take charge of their own education and have the motivation to put in the time and effort to accomplish their goals. They now have the blueprint to get through college more efficiently, or if changing majors, to get back on track quickly. Hopefully this will help them avoid the expensive five or six-year Bachelor’s degree many students end up with today.
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