What Color Is Your Parachute? (15 page)

This informative Canadian site has great general information about jobs and career planning:
http://nextsteps.org
.

Through RoadTripNation, young adults have interviewed working people on six continents. Their goal: to make sure every individual has the opportunity to find his or her own road in life. Listen to interviews with fascinating people at
www.roadtripnation.com
.

For creative ideas to help you build your first career path, see the website of Marty Nemko, PhD (creator of the Job Meter). Click on “Find a Career” in the upper left under
Article Topics
:
www.martynemko.com
.

Websites for Young Entrepreneurs

www.sba.gov/teens

www.score.org/young.html

Junior Achievement operates programs in most U.S. states and many European countries:
http://studentcenter.ja.org/aspx/PlanBusiness/
.

Do You Need a Career Coach?

Career coaching can help high school students broaden their horizons about the type of major they might pursue in college or the type of career they might launch into after high school. A coach can help you better discover your marketable skills, identify your fields of fascination, and determine viable options to pursue once you have obtained your high school degree. A coach will carefully listen to your wants, needs, and goals; during the coaching sessions the coach uses questions, written exercises, and feedback to help you consider options and make informed decisions. To learn more about what a career coach can do for you, visit
www.youthleadershipcareers.com
.

Excellent career coaching can also be found at
www.jobfindingpartners.com
.

DOES
it sometimes seem that the future is very far away? Does it seem that doing what you love to do is just a fantasy? If you do nothing now—if you just hope that this will somehow increase your options—you are likely to graduate and have no idea how to turn your career fantasies into a real job. But there are steps you can take to help that fantasy become reality, because right now, at this very moment, you are creating your future. In this part of the book, we’ll look at some of the steps you can take to realize the future you want.

In
chapter 5
, you’ll discover ways to make the most of your high school years and use them to move yourself closer to finding and enjoying your dream job.
Chapter 6
will tell you how you can use those college years most productively to prepare yourself for work you’ll love—and it’s not only for those of you who plan to go to college.
Chapter 6
actually includes a lot of great information and advice about higher education for everyone. In
chapter 7
you’ll learn to set goals—a tool that will help you not only to shape your future but also to get through this school year! Finally,
chapter 8
gives you a new spin on an old tool: using social networking sites for career exploration and job search.

This exploration—making the most of high school and college and learning new tools—will give you the freedom to follow your dreams and move confidently into the future and toward finding work that you’ll love.

5

What Do I Do Now?

MAKING THE MOST OF HIGH SCHOOL

High school matters! And not as a boring waiting room until graduation or college, when “real life” begins. You can use your high school years to learn technical skills, put together academic and activity achievements to help you get into college, explore careers, and put together a detailed plan. Students usually know that to succeed they need reasonably good grades. What most don’t know is the
importance of making tentative career decisions and creating a plan for how to achieve career and life goals.

Why do you need a detailed plan? Studies of students—whether they go to college or not—show that those who achieve their life and career ambitions have a detailed plan. The plan gives them focus. They know why they are in school and how their classes relate to their plan. They also know obstacles that are likely to come up and have created strategies for overcoming those obstacles.

Does getting a job or starting a career seem light-years away? For some of you, that may almost be true. (We say “almost” because the future actually seems to come more quickly than we expect!)
Transitioning from high school to your preferred career or a full-time job you enjoy can take up to ten years.
This is one reason you want to start work on this transition while you are still in high school. You can use your high school classes and extracurricular activities to build a strong foundation for your first career pathway.

Just like a savvy politician, you can use your time in high school to set up a “campaign” that will help you achieve your future career goals. This campaign includes increasing your awareness of the work world, developing job-search skills, creating a career portfolio, and considering whether you want or need to go to college. We’ll explore all of those things in this chapter. And because it’s good to think about what lies ahead, we’ll also take a brief look at what comes after high school.

Awareness of the Work World

As you learn more about the world of work, your awareness of career possibilities and different kinds of jobs grows. All the work you’ve done in the preceding chapters—exploring your interests, skills, and preferences concerning work environments and people to work with, and identifying potential dream jobs—provides a solid foundation for your growing awareness.

Even without realizing it, you’re probably already doing things that are helping your awareness to grow. You may, for example, be paying more attention to what people do to earn a living. You may take a career interest assessment that suggests some jobs you might like but didn’t know about previously. You may have older friends or siblings who have left school and started jobs that you didn’t even know existed. You may notice who enjoys their work, and who doesn’t.

You can also help your awareness of the work world grow by focusing some of your high school experiences—
class assignments, extracurricular activities, part-time or summer work—on possibilities for your future. Let’s take a brief look at some of your options.

Class Assignments

Need to do a book report? Read a book about a superstar in the industry that most interests you. Or pick one of the many helpful books listed at the end of this chapter. Need
to do a report? Pick a profession, field, or industry that interests you and do a research paper. You might, for example, research which Fortune 500 companies were started by people who didn’t finish college. Need to do a presentation? Report on what you learned in preparing your parachute and conducting your information interviews. In doing a presentation like this, you not only fulfill a class requirement, but you may also help your friends and classmates learn good skills for finding work they’ll love.

In high school, I wish I’d known there were more options beyond doctor, lawyer, or businessperson. I also wish I’d known that you never have to choose what you are going to do forever. You can always change.

—ALICE PRAGER, marketing manager, age 29

If your school has a community service requirement for graduation, look for ways in which you can both serve your community and explore your career interests. For example, if you’re interested in being a social worker, perhaps you can fulfill your requirement by volunteering at a social service agency and developing a mentor program for refugee students from different countries. Or if you’re interested in politics, perhaps you could work with the Registrar of Voters and help set up a program to register students who have just reached voting age.

Extracurricular Activities

Besides being fun and a great way to make friends, extracurricular activities can also help you explore career possibilities and develop valuable skills. Band, choir, drama, sports, service- or interest-based clubs (for example, language, math, business, teaching), student government, and other activities can provide opportunities to test out your interests and hone your skills. For example, if you think you’d like to teach music, perhaps your band or choir director would let you rehearse a new piece of music with the freshman choir or band. Or if you’d like to be an accountant, taking on the responsibilities of treasurer for a club would allow you to track income and expenditures, create a budget, collect dues, and so on. If you’re active in drama, perhaps you could write and direct a one-act play. Serving as an officer of a club, a class, or the student body will help you develop both leadership and people skills.

If you have a particularly supportive and encouraging teacher, club adviser, band or choir director, coach, or other faculty member in an extracurricular activity, talk with that person. Ask what you can do to learn more about jobs related to that activity and how you can develop skills that could be valuable in the work world.

Part-Time or Summer Work

You may get conflicting messages about whether or not you should work while you’re in high school. Some people, like economist Steve Hamilton, believe you should put all your energy into your studies and get good grades. According to Dr. Hamilton, “Students get more long-term benefit from improving their grades than they do from a job at Arby’s. Employers are looking for signals that a young person is motivated and ambitious. Grades are one signal.”

Other people believe that working part-time or in the summer can help you develop important time-management, social, and job skills as well as a sense of responsibility. In some cases, family financial circumstances may require that you work while in high school. If you want or need to work, use your job to develop skills that you can use elsewhere. Even better, find a job in one of the areas you’re most interested in, if possible. For example, if you work in a fast-food outlet, develop valuable skills in working with the public. If you have a good supervisor, ask him or her to teach you some basic supervision skills. If you’re interested in child development, look for work at a child care center. Instead of taking a part-time job just to earn money, use it to learn skills that will help you find your dream job in the years to come. In addition, save at least a third of your paycheck if you can. Teenagers typically spend 98 percent of what they earn. Spending beyond our means has gotten our country and its citizens into huge financial messes. If you are able to save one or two thousand dollars from your high school jobs, you’ll have the money for necessary tools—from funding your college textbooks to taking a trip to check out a potential employer or attend a professional conference.