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Parents and Guardians
The Kuder Career Planning System helps guide parents and
students through a successful 8th grade transition and prepares students for a
successful post-high school transition. Having an education and career plan in
place can improve education and career satisfaction and success now and
throughout one’s lifetime. Many schools, districts, and statewide agencies
provide the Kuder Career Planning System to students. If your child is
using the system, be sure to learn more about it. Your interest and involvement
is vital to your child’s success. If your child does not have access to the Kuder
system through school, you can purchase individual lifelong access to the Kuder
Career Planning System for only $19.95. Invest in your child’s
future—or your own—today!
For more information about the Kuder Career Planning System,
please contact National Career Assessment Services, Inc., (NCASI) at
ncasi@ncasi.com or 800-314-8972.
Read on to learn more about how to help your child with the
career-planning process.
A Guide to Helping Your Children with the Career-Planning Process
By JoAnn Harris Bowlsbey, Ed.D.
You’ve probably found a lot of areas in which your schooling
didn’t prepare you for parenthood, and now you’ve found one more – knowing how
to help your children with career planning! National polls tell us that parents
are the primary influence on the career development of their children – their
choices about education in and after high school and about their work.
It may seem at first glance that we end up in one occupation or
another through chance. Though there is an element of chance, there is also a
step-by step process of planning that can be very helpful. Following this
process will increase the likelihood that your child will make choices that are
more satisfying. So, the purpose of this guide is to tell you about that
process and to suggest ways that you, as a parent or significant adult in a
young person’s life, can help. This process can be represented by this graphic:
Children do not yet know what future decisions they will face
related to career planning. Neither do they know that seemingly small
choices—such as deciding to take General Mathematics rather than Algebra to
fill a math requirement—are important. So the first step in good career
planning is to learn that it is desirable to start thinking about career
planning by the 5th or 6th grade and to start making tentative choices. Of
course, those can and probably will change. These early choices do, however,
form the beginning of a chain of choices that is very important. What can you
do during the elementary school years to help your child be ready for and
understand something about the choices that are ahead? Here are a few
suggestions:
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Take every opportunity to teach decision making through planning for family
events, such as a party or a vacation. Once learned, this attitude of
“planfulness” will carry over to other areas of life.
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Take every opportunity to commend your child for good work or behavior. Having
a strong self-concept and a sense of being able to control one’s life
successfully is an important ingredient of successful career planning.
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Talk about your own work at home. Most children cannot explain what their
parents do for a living.
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Take your child to work with you occasionally and point out not only what you
do but what other workers do.
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Encourage your child to talk with adult relatives and friends about the kind of
work they do.
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Help your child understand that all kinds of work are needed in our society and
are honorable.
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Teach your child an easy way to organize different kinds of work. As he or she
learns about different jobs, help to place them within this map of jobs. The Kuder
Career Planning System features a well-researched method of organizing
occupations and jobs called career clusters. Through the system, you will have
access to definitions of and information about career clusters.
People who study why some are happy with their work and others
are not tell us that the most important thing to know is what you like to do,
that is, your interests. In other words, if people can perform tasks that they
like to do when on the job, they are much more likely to be happy with their
work and to do well at it. By the middle school years, a child’s interests are
in the process of being formed. The older the child is, the more settled these
interests become. Here are some ways you can help your child realize what his
or her strongest interests are:
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Expose your child to a wide variety of activities – activities in which he or
she can work with people in some way, can work with numbers and information,
can work with tools and equipment, and can work with thoughts and ideas. Those
who analyze the things that people do at work tell us that work activities are
made up of these four: working with people face to face; working with numbers,
facts, and records; working with tools, machines, and equipment; and working
with the mind and imagination.
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When your child discovers an interest in some kind of activity and does well at
it, give him or her some kind of reward. This may be as simple as a good word,
a touch, or some tangible present. Help your child understand what that
interest is.
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Help your child think about how an interest or skill that he or she has can be
used in a job.
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As you help your child with homework, point out how some of the things he or
she is learning in school can be applied to work. This linkage is especially
important for subjects in which your child achieves good grades.
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Encourage your child to take the Kuder Career Search with Person Match,
an inventory of interests, and the Kuder Skills Assessment, a
self-rating of skills.
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Review the results of the Kuder Career Search
with your child, and ask your child’s school counselor to add to your
understanding of the report. Your child may print out this report, or may give
you his or her personal access code to look at the results on the Internet.
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These results can help you and your child to know which of the “clusters” of
occupations described above to explore first. They also can help in planning
for courses in high school that will develop the skills needed to do work in
that area.
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Review the results of the Kuder Skills Assessment with your child. These
results can help you and your child identify the areas of greatest skill.
Remember, though, that skills can be developed through course work and life
experience, and that these results will change. It is best to consider your
child’s interests first and then make plans to build the skills needed to go
into occupations suggested by those interests.
There is no one right occupation for your child, but there are
many occupations that can suit his or her interests and skills. With all the
changes that are taking place rapidly in the 21st century, it is good to have
several possible choices. Though there are about 1,000 occupations, it is easy
to shorten the list of possibilities after getting the results of the Kuder
Career Search interest inventory. Here are some ways to do that:
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Look at your child’s score report from the Kuder Career Search on the Kuder
web site (www.kuder.com). You will need your child’s user name and password in
order to do that. Select the name of the cluster with the highest score, and
look at the list of occupational titles that is displayed. If you are in a
place where the computer is connected to a printer, print out the list. This
list will be a good starting point for discussion of possible occupational
choices. Over time, you and your child will remove and add occupations as you
learn more about them using the Kuder system and other sources.
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Add the names of other occupations to that list that you and your child have
thought of as possibilities.
Now is the time to get more detailed information about the
occupations you identified in Step 3. Try these activities:
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Sign on to the Kuder Career Planning System
(www.kuder.com) with your child. Read the descriptions of occupations suggested
by the Kuder Career Search with your son or daughter. For most occupations you
will also have access to a short video. This video will help your child
understand the day-to-day work tasks of the job. If you are in a place where
the computer is connected to a printer, print out descriptions of some that are
of interest.
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Record in your child’s electronic portfolio the names of those occupations that
you and your child are favoring. Do this by clicking on a large yellow star
that appears with the description of each occupation.
It is important to shorten the list of favorite occupations
before or during the early high school years in order to make a four-year
course plan related to those tentative choices. This step may be the most
difficult one. Here are some things that can help:
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Help your child find a couple of people in your community who work in each of
the occupations being seriously considered. Set up an appointment to spend a
half hour with each of these and to have what is called an “information
interview.” In this interview, your child should ask questions about what the
person does at work every day, what he or she likes and dislikes about the
work, how much training it took, and what the future of the occupation may be.
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Using the Kuder Career Planning System, find out how much and what
kind (apprenticeship, career-technology school, community college, four-year
college) of education is needed after high school to enter each occupation
being considered.
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Find out what the U.S. Department of Labor is predicting about the future of
each occupation. Will the demand for workers in this field grow or decline?
Also, find out what the typical salary is for people who work in each
occupation. This information is provided on the Kuder
web site.
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After learning about daily work tasks, educational requirements, future job
demand, and income, help your child relate his or her interests, goals, and
emerging values to each occupation being considered.
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Finally, help your child shorten the list of possibilities (which may later be
changed) to three.
Though both parents and counselors often get it backwards, young
people do need to decide about their occupational goals before planning their
courses in high school and their education beyond high school. Once your child
has shortened the list of favored occupations to three, it will be possible to
plan for education beyond high school and select courses for the high school
years that would be most helpful. Here are some ways to do that:
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Using the Kuder Career Planning System, find out which of the six
occupational clusters each of the three occupations belongs to.
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Look at the suggested four-year high school plan for each of the clusters.
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Print out the blank work form and, with a school counselor’s help, complete a
tentative plan for each of the four years of high school.
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Make a tentative decision with your child about the kind of education beyond
high school he or she wants and is needed for the occupations of choice. (The
U.S. Department of Labor indicates that about 20% of the jobs in the early 21st
century will require a four-year college degree; 65% will require up to two
years of training after high school in a community college, career-technology
school, or apprenticeship; and 15% can be entered with a high school diploma.)
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Be sure that the four-year high school plan includes courses required by a
four-year college (if this is the choice made in the previous step) as well as
courses that prepare your child for work.
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Using the Kuder Career Planning System, help your child find schools
to attend after high school that offer the major(s) needed for the occupations
selected. The college comparison function allows you to compare the features of
up to three selected colleges side by side.
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Help your child get through all the steps of planning for further education
after high school: identifying schools, visiting these campuses, taking the
necessary entrance examination, completing applications, assessing financial
need, and applying for financial aid.
Cheer up! After all of this work, your child will finally get a
job and become financially independent. This step requires that he or she keep
a portfolio (the Kuder Career Planning System offers one online for a
lifetime) that includes school experience, work experience, awards and
activities, special skills, and well-written resumes. You can help with the
step of getting a job, too, in these ways:
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As human “networking” is the best way to get a job, encourage your young person
to talk with relatives and family friends about the kind of job he or she is
looking for.
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Help your son or daughter understand what employers expect of an employee. More
people are fired because they do not practice good work habits (being
consistent in attendance, being on time, getting along with the boss and
co-workers) than because they can’t do the tasks required in the job.
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Encourage your son or daughter to use web sites, such as America’s Job Bank,
that are available through the Kuder Career Planning System in order to
learn more about job-seeking skills, post a resume, and find job openings.
Of course, when you get through with this whole process, it may
start all over again! Especially in the 21st century, people will have many
employers and several different kinds of jobs. For that reason, they need to
keep their portfolios updated, and they need to understand the process we have
just described. The combination of these two things will help them make the
many changes they may need to make over their life span.
Get Started
Register
now to create an account and begin career planning. Registering gives you
access to the Kuder Career Portfolio, and from there, you can purchase
lifelong access to the entire Kuder Career Planning System.
Invest $19.95 (US) in your future!
If you already have an account,
log in now!
Kuder is a registered trademark of National Career
Assessment Services, Inc., (NCASI), a subsidiary of The Harrington Group of
Companies. Develop Your Future is a registered trademark of JoAnn
Harris-Bowlsbey and Nancy S. Perry.
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