Taking the Guesswork Out of Choosing a Career (view)
Units included with this Open Author resource:
- Theory and Hints
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- Learning goals:
- Define career development vocabulary and describe research based career development practice.
- Putting the Puzzle Together
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- Learning goals:
- Identify the steps and decisions that comprise the career decision making process.
- Discovering Your Work Personality
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- Learning goals:
- Students will complete career assessments in order to identify the characteristics of their work personality.
- Career Clusters & Career Identities
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- Learning goals:
- Students will learn about the 16 Career Clusters and their corresponding pathways., Students will identify the career clusters and pathways that most closely relate to their work personality.
- What Are Your Next Steps? Networking is the Key.
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- Learning goals:
- The student will create a detailed action plan, with specific steps that need to be accomplished, to accomplish the student's career goals.
- Keywords:
- acp, Academic and Career Planning, career development, career goals, career assessments
Summary
The formation of a personal career identify or work personality is the key to helping students understand the type of careers that they will find fulfilling. The key is guiding the students through assessments where thematic, or repeating characteristics, are identified with the help of teachers, counselor, or other adults. This collection of lessons has been used successfully with "at-risk" youth many times. The student identifies career clusters of interests then correlates their work personality/career identity to the pathway within career clusters of interest. This strategy helps organize the world of careers into a more manageable one so the student can conceptualize the selection of careers using a simple guided process. There are written assessments for use and links to online. Educators may want to utilize tools that are available to them. Teachers working with homeless and "at-risk" youth have indicated that the hard copy assessments are necessary to their work. The process will remain the same. It is important that the students see the results of the assessment and descriptions in one place to assist with the identification of reoccuring themes.