What can a student do to prepare for a career after high school?

Exploration/Curious about an Interest or Career -- Try things out!

• Choose electives

• Join clubs

• Internships/Part time jobs

• Job Shadowing

Naviance Career Assessments

There is science to choosing a career that an individual might find fulfilling. Career theory shows that knowledge about an person's interests, abilities and personality type matter in career choice. Psychologists have developed assessments to help individuals learn about themselves in this way. These assessments are available through Naviance.

Counselors may visit classrooms to present this information but students can also take advantage of the assessments independently. The assessment results lead a student to possible careers for them that they then have the opportunity to further investigate. Naviance also has Road Trip Nation which provides quick video clips of real people talking about their work and careers.

To find these tools go to Naviance > Self Discovery (left top menu choice > see list of potential assessments. Note that some assessments only allow a single take.

The Career Interest Inventory will give a ranking of six Interest Groups. Using these groups, further research can be done based on the single group or a combination. One helpful website is O'net managed by the US Department of Labor. Here is the link. Further research can happen on Naviance as well.

The Career Cluster Inventory will rank your interests and self-identified abilities into clusters of specific careers. The O'net allows further research by Career Cluster. Here is the link.

The Achieveworks Personality Inventory will give student's a personality type code. Additional research can also be done by a simple search of careers for people with a specific personality type. A bit more in depth learning about personality type will help educate students on how their unique selves will best thrive in work settings and challenges. This link offers a definition/explanation.

These tools are helpful for narrowing down an individual's possibilities from everything to ideas about specific clusters, interest areas, and personality fits. Learning about one's self takes time and effort and career exploration is no different. These tools open the door to information about careers, but students will need to spend time exploring and researching to benefit.

Build Up A Resume

• Internships

• Part time Job

• Challenging Course Work

• Community Service

• Involvement in school outside the classroom

• Job shadowing

High school is a rare time in life to explore, to experiment, to try out Varied possibilities for careers.