Career Planning: It's Never too Early to Start

by William Rapai
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Maria Hartman doesn’t remember much about the career aptitude test she took last year in eighth grade. She knows that she put information about her interests and her strengths and weaknesses into a computer. The computergave her back a list of careers that might interest her. She’s still not sure what she wants to do.

But Maria, 14, her mother Michelle and local school guidance counselor Christine Cramer all agree that even though the computer exercises didn’t set off any fireworks, it ignited a critical spark in the freshman at Michigan’s Grosse Pointe South High School.

For the first time, she started thinking about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. More immediately, she charted out a map for the courses and experiences that would pave her road to success.

“Our goal is to get kids looking at the bigger picture,” says Cramer. “Kids at this age tend to live in the moment. They’re not thinking about next week. They’re not thinking about their strengths and weaknesses. That kind of thing is irrelevant in their lives right now.”

“So this is a good time to get them to start– because they would not otherwise be doing that on their own,” Cramer says. “We don’t even want them to narrow it down to one pathway—we just want to get them thinking about the possibilities.”

And the possibilities for today’s students are surprising. The tech explosion and service sector expansion have created whole new career fields while wiping out others. It’s a different job market than their parents entered as few as twenty years ago.

On the one hand many manufacturing and technical jobs once thought low-skilled and low-pay, now provide professional wages. On the other hand, more and more jobs where a high school degree was enough now require at least a one or two-year college degree just to get in the door.

During this time, the unemployment rate for drop-outs and even for those who stop at high school graduation has surged, while the number of factory jobs held by people with some college education has tripled.

Fortunately, Cramer says students like Maria have new opportunities to explore and prepare for careers through:

• School programs that help students choose their courses and programs based on their career interests.

• Specialized schools that allow students to take college-level classes in high school or attend a school within a school where their daily classroom work is based on their chosen career pathway.

• A growing variety of internship, informational interview and job shadowing programs.

• After-school community programs that teach business, personal finance and life skills.
Not Your Father's Career Ladder

Although programs vary, there’s been a major change in the way schools look at this issue.

Twenty years ago, a guidance counselor might have put a student like Maria on a track to college or a vocational school without giving her personal interests a second thought. Today, students are not only encouraged to explore broad career areas but are also expected to enter high school having made some initial choices and begun a plan for their future.

At this point, parents might be wondering: why should my child start to think about a career that may be five or 10 years away when he can’t even decide what to wear to school in the morning?

Making education relevant—particularly at this level—is critical because students are more likely to drop out in ninth grade than any other grade, according to Patty Cantu, director of the Michigan Office of Career and Technical Preparation.

“Lots of students begin to wonder why they are taking these courses," Cantu said. "They don’t think they’re ever going to use this stuff.”

“It’s a process. Students shouldn’t have to make a career choice [from scratch] in the 12th grade; they lack the aptitude and self-knowledge,” Cantu says. “So schools are starting as early as kindergarten to help children explore careers. What does a firefighter do? What does a police officer do?”

“In middle school, we ask students to start thinking with a little more structure and to start to develop a plan for what they want to do in high school,” Cantu says. “If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you need these skills; if you want to be a mechanic, you need these other skills.”
New High School Choices

The first step in that future career may be choosing a high school program. For some, that process has become almost as important as choosing a college. In larger districts, students can choose between an old-fashioned comprehensive high school or new models like academic academies and middle colleges.

Even in some rural districts students have more choices through regional programs and virtual learning courses taught over the Internet. For example, Bayshore High School in Bradenton, Florida, has three academic academies—schools within the high school.

Each specializes in a different career pathway: engineering, performing arts and science, says Vice Principal Elizabeth Howard. “We want to show them that the skills they get here transfer to other fields,” Howard says. “If you are going into the medical field, you still need to have good writing skills and you have to be able to do a certain level of math. We need to give kids the necessary skills to survive and to be able to transfer their skills from one career to another.”

A different model at San Mateo Middle College in San Mateo, CA gives kids a head start on college. Principal Greg Quigley says juniors and seniors take college-level classes at the College of San Mateo along with their high school courses. Because there’s a strong career development emphasis, the high school students also use the college’s career development center and attend its job skill seminars and career fairs.

Such middle college programs, once thought to fit only the most gifted students, are now helping a wider circle of students accelerate their learning and tie it to something they can use to get ahead.

But before enrolling a student in a high school or special program, Larry Good, CEO of Corporation for a Skilled Workforce in Ann Arbor, MI urges parents to explore their options. Because many large districts offer several different types of high schools, parents need to ask, which of these schools can teach my child skills that will transfer across wide careers with several different kinds of employers?

“When I was a kid, the model was you would go to work for a company and navigate [up the ladder] within the company,” Good says. “Now, because people shift jobs and careers so often, they need skills that will go from one place to another.”

They should also ask about the program’s bottom line. What percentage of students takes courses where they can earn college credit? And what percentage of those students actually do well enough in the course to get college credit? What’s the breakdown of where students who start in the program end up? Can you talk to some of them?
Me And My Shadow

Learning about careers and picking up job skills doesn’t end at the schoolhouse door. In fact, students often learn more through hands-on experiences with employers and specialized community programs. Hands-on experience in the job market now comes in a wide variety of flavors and bite size packages that can cost as little as a few hours in a busy student’s schedule. Popular favorites include:

* Information interview.
The quickest and most overlooked way for students to get the inside scoop on a field and build connections that could land them a job some day. In a little more than an hour, you can learn more from a single live person than you might in a week of Internet searches.

* Job shadow.
Like a long informational interview except you’ll tag along with your interviewee for a few hours or a few days to see how she actually spends her time.

* Internship.
Your free or partially paid grunt labor in exchange for a few weeks or a few months of seeing how a business in your field really works and learning some on-the-job basics. The best internships allow you to take responsibility for a project or task and spend some of your time job shadowing the roles that interest you most.

* Work.
You can learn some good work fundamentals—being prompt, serving others, taking responsibility—even while you’re burger flipping. But look a little harder and you may find work that will let you get paid for exploring your interests and acquiring entry-level office or technical skills that will open the door to better jobs. Outside work can actually help boost academic performance, so long as it stays under ten hours a week during the school year.

* Running a business.
There’s more than one way to make a living and it doesn’t have to be working for someone else. Entrepreneurs are the spark that keeps our economy burning. Get a feel for the heat first hand by figuring out how to provide top-notch customer service to your lawn mowing or babysitting customers. Take it to the next level by finding products or services that you can sell to your neighbors. Take it to the max by hiring your pals to help. You may or may not earn a lot, but you’ll definitely learn a lot.

Keith Gall, a vice president at Junior Achievement Worldwide, has helped develop a national job shadow program that takes place every Groundhog’s Day for more than 1 million students. The job shadow program is exactly as it sounds: a student follows a willing adult through a workday.

“The idea behind job shadowing is not to get kids on a path that they can’t change from, but give them an idea of what’s out there,” Gall says. “This is more about getting exposure than it is about making a final decision.”

Gall believes it’s critical for children to get workplace experience before they leave high school, even if it’s just to eliminate a possible career. If a path they once thought paved with gold is really full of potholes, it’s a lot easier to find that out now and choose another route than after ten years of preparing for a career that’s the wrong fit.

If a student’s school doesn’t have a job-shadow program, companies are often willing to open their doors to curious students through a contact with their human resource or public relations department. Boys and Girls Clubs and the Boy Scouts’ Explorers program provide another way to connect with careers. The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) gives students a chance to learn about teamwork skills and jobs in the military.

Counselor Cramer compares the process to taking a trip.

“We‘re starting them on a long path,” Cramer says. “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”



William Rapai is a stay-at-home dad of two girls in Grosse Pointe, MI, who has also worked as an editor at the Detroit Free Press and the Boston Globe. With his youngest daughter starting kindergarten next year, he’s starting to think about his own career goals — again.