Career Planning
Planning for college involves career planning. Since college is a major stepping-stone to your future career, it makes sense to know a little bit about your destination before you begin your journey.
If you take time now to plan your future, you’ll be able to enjoy it once you get there. A number of resources are available to help you develop a career plan.
Internet sites like Mapping Your Future provide free career planning and a wealth of information on college planning for students and parents. Like any other life plan, it may seem overwhelming, but career planning can be broken down into five simple steps, and there are valuable resources available to you throughout the entire process.
Identify Your Skills and Interests
- Ask yourself questions like: What make you happy? If you had spare time, what would you do? Do you like to read? What are your hobbies?
- Are you shy or reserved? Are you thoughtful or impulsive? Outgoing? Logical? Sensitive? Your personality traits are significant factors in determining which careers are best suited to you.
- Are you the friend that everyone calls when they have a problem? Can you take a motor apart and put it back together? When you read a story, are you able to find the meaning intended by the author?
Your answers to these questions can reveal your interests and skills. Those interests and skills offer insight into yourself and that is important when you begin developing your career plan.
Use Available Resources
Guidance Counselors are trained to help you get to know yourself. Teachers, parents and other relatives can share experiences about their own college and career choices. Personality inventories like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® can help identify your personality traits. Aptitude tests, like the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, help measure your aptitudes while you are in high school. (Taking the test doesn’t mean you have to enlist, but it is a very thorough aptitude test.) Talk with your guidance counselor or search online for other personality inventories and aptitude tests.
Know Your Options After High School and Research Occupations
Whether you choose vocational, technical or trade school or a traditional two or four year college, Student Assistance Foundation can help you get there. The first step is to know what your options are for after high school. The Options After High School table provides a quick overview of the educational opportunities available to you and some additional information about what to consider for each option. Take a look at this table in conjunction with all of your other planning research.
Research Occupations
Now that you know more about your options after high school and have a better idea of your skills and interests, it is time to learn about different occupations. Find out more about the jobs that interest you. For example, salary, working conditions, hours, and benefits. You should also consider the future job outlook for the career, the potential growth and advancement opportunities, and the education requirements.
There are a number of online sites that provide Occupational Research statistics. The US Department of Labor publishes the Occupational Outlook Handbook that includes 10-year projections for US workers. You can view it online at www.bls.gov. Another site we strongly recommend for your career planning is CareerShip.
Develop a career plan
Match your skills and interests with the occupations you’ve listed. Look at the occupations that closely match up to your skills and interests — this is probably the career or at least the field of study that you should consider. It is the first step in developing your career plan.
This process may help you discover career options that you may not have considered. Your career plan can be a specific job (teacher, technical writer) or a more general field (education, communications).
A career plan helps you helps you think about what you want to do and helps identify what you would be good at. Once you have developed a career plan, then you can work on specific tasks to achieve your goal.