Since 2004 IDEA re-authorization, schools have been charged with creating transition plans for students with IEP’s to include specific plans on how the student will be prepared for life after high school, whether it be work, post secondary education, or both. Let’s look at where you might begin with your middle or high school students as they being thinking about careers.
This is where I am going start with my students.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/4534362371/sizes/z/in/photostream/
First, register at Princeton Review and then click here to take the career interest 24 question survey. Be sure to save your registration information so you can save materials and go back and look at what you have saved. As with most surveys answer the questions fairly quickly.
Once you finish the survey you get a an Interest Color and A Usual Color. Mine happen to be Interest=Green and Usual=Red. Then about 50 careers are generated from my interests with links to each career that give me more information including facts and figures about salary, the options to move up the career ladder, what the present and future may hold, and even what someone in this profession might read.
This site is also linked to SAT’s, ACT’s and college information.
The other Career site I found was Office of Science Education
Here I began with 127 careers, I chose 2 categories, narrowed my choices down to 10 careers. Next, I selected about 30 skills I felt I had or would like to have, finally I ended up with 5 careers if I had a Master’s degree and 3 if I had a Bachelor’s degree. This only took about 10 minutes to get to the 8 careers I ended up with.
Another great website will send students to look at what their career may eventually pay them.This website would be a great site to look at with groups of students so they could read, collect data and report out to the group the variety of jobs they might be interested in.
If you are on holiday, share this blog with your students, let them begin the search. One nice result, I still have teaching in my career choices, but also a few in the science field I did not know about. I wonder what my students’ career options will be?
