Career Exploration
Helping Your Teen Choose the Right Career Path
As an adult, have you ever thought, “I wish I knew what I wanted to be when I grow up” or maybe, “Wow, that is a cool job, I wish I had known about that.”
Imagine how your kids feel! No one is providing this information for them, and our workforce is changing exponentially. Career exploration is a gift for peace of mind and future happiness.
Trust the Career Exploration Process
Our process begins with various personality inventories to help your child understand and recognize their innate traits and how they may affect their happiness in a career.
We then provide an Interest Inventory to determine your child’s interest in the workforce– not just what they are good at. We expose them to over 500 careers so they can begin to understand the vast number of opportunities available to them. Too often kids only think of the careers that everyone talks about: Engineer, Doctor, Lawyer, Nurse, Teacher, or state “maybe something in business”, but they have no idea what that really means.
Once we have an idea of what your child is interested in, we will continue to narrow down the options by diving deeper; we will look into the average salary, growth rate, daily tasks and duties, work environment, necessary skills, and education required in relation to that career. As your child discovers careers that are of interest consider, we will also look at similar careers to make sure that all options are explored. At this point, we will begin to see patterns in their interests and traits that are important to your child.
We will then set up career shadows so they can get an idea of what a day in the life of a person in that career is like. We will provide questions for their shadow opportunity, so they get the most out of the day. The opportunity to meet with a professional provides not only valuable insight but also the opportunity to begin establishing contacts in their career field. This is helpful for future internships and jobs.
The purpose of the career exploration is to make sure that your child is confident when choosing the right major and path in college, which makes them less likely to waste time and money by switching majors or feeling unsure and overwhelmed when they realize there are over 400 majors at many schools. Once your child has a career in mind, it will be easy to determine what major is best for them and will make college selection a more efficient task.
Career Exploration Blogs
Check out some of our recent blog posts about how career exploration can help your child!
How to Help Your Teen Narrow Down Their College Major
How do you get a high school student to start narrowing down what their focus is? At KMAC, we use an assessment that's a little bit different to help students find their career or college major. Aside from a standard personality test, we have found it really helpful to make students think about the whole process in a different manner.
How To Help Your Child Choose The Right Career Path
One of the goals of high school is to prepare students for the “next level” of education, but the reality is that the "next level" is different for everyone. Not all careers begin with a 4-year degree. Some require a post-graduate degree (which means more than 4 years!), or maybe a 2-year degree, technical or trade school, apprenticeships, or none of the above! The question becomes, how do you decide what kind of school or training you should pursue?
Does My 17-Year-Old Really Need a Career Plan Before College?
Your child needs to think about how they want their life to look after college. What values are important to them? What skills do they have? What’s their vision? We really encourage students to think about what their days will look like in a chosen career path.
