Most of our students are going to college. Why would they need a course like this?
50% of students drop out of college or do not graduate within six years. That statistic alone should convince you of the need for ALL students to receive a CGC. In addition, studies of college students show that students who are career-focused and career-committed are far more likely to graduate from college and transition into the workforce at the level for which their college education prepared them. Today, 20% of 26-year-olds live at home or are not economically independent of their parents. Addressing the issue as it relates to economic self-sufficiency requires students to understand the necessity for a career focus.
Is it really possible to get the average 14-year-old to write a comprehensive 10-year plan for their future?
Absolutely! When taught in sequence, Career Choices leads students through a step-by-step process (up to 100 active-learning exercises) that enables them to articulate who they are and what they want their lives to look like after high school. Each of the activities builds on the ones before. When documented in the Workbook and Portfolio, students can easily compile their plan and store it online to reassess, review, modify, or update later
Why 10 years? Isn't four or five years enough? Our school has each student complete a four-year graduation plan.
It's important that young people be able to envision -- and then plan for -- a productive future as a self-sufficient adult. A four-year plan gets the typical student through high school graduation. A five-year plan may get them into college but, as we all know, the college dropout rate is 50%. Therefore, a 10-year plan is needed to take them through high school, post-secondary education/training, and into the workforce understanding what it takes to become financially responsible for themselves and their future families.
How is a comprehensive guidance course different than a career exploration course?
While career exploration is an important subset of a comprehensive guidance course (CGC), a CGC is so much more. In addition to career exploration, a CGC must help students:
- Learn to project into the future and understand the consequences of today's choices and actions
- Understand how to match academic and educational effort to lifestyle expectations
- Become identity-achieved through contemplation and self-discovery
- Learn and practice the communication, interpersonal, and self-management skills necessary to succeed in today's educational and workforce settings
- Learn to project into the future and understand the consequences of today's choices and actions
- Identify and plan for the challenges and stumbling blocks that are inevitable in today's fast-paced, competitive world
- Analyze quantitatively what economic self-sufficiency equals for them
- Become proactive, rather than reactive, in managing change in their lives
Besides traditional career exploration topics, a CGC helps young people understand the challenges and the benefits of a consciously-planned career path. Armed with this information, they are far more likely to persevere when they hit life's "speed bumps."
Our school uses a software-based (or online) tool for helping students choose a career. Isn't that enough?
It might be enough for the top 20%-30% of your students -- perhaps. For those students who receive this information and exploration at home, a couple of hours with a software program might be all the extra guidance they need. But for the balance of your students -- the ones who do not see the relevance in education and cannot envision a productive future with plans to realize their dreams -- a couple hours in front of a computer screen is just not enough to set them on the path to making the second most important decision of their lives: How they'll spend 40 hours per week for the next 40 years.
In addition, it is important that ALL students have the skills and information necessary to change direction when they are forced to (or want to) change careers. If they learn the process using the real-world research and decision-making applications readily available on U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored websites (rather than relying on lab-based software programs that are unavailable once they graduate), they'll have the confidence to plot their own productive work-life course. They'll be empowered with the skills to manage their own career trajectory after they leave school and will not have to rely on tools that "magically" come up with a career choice or direction once a survey is completed.
