Future Career Outlook
A previous article focused on your student taking assessments and partnering skills, interests and work values to a possible career. Hopefully, you found the CareerOneStop website valuable and easy to navigate, and your student is further along in determining a career option. But what is the likelihood of a job being available after high school or college? CareerOneStop also has some additional useful concepts and tools regarding goal-setting and career outlook we would like you to consider.
Why It Matters
- Set goals.
Making and achieving goals happens throughout a lifetime – in school, activities, career, and personal life. It’s very easy to state a goal – “I want to be a teacher” – but much more difficult reaching the goal without having a plan in place. - Determine the future career outlook.
If your student is narrowing down the list of career options, it’s also important to determine the likelihood of those careers being available, and where they’ll be available, after high school or college.
What Your Student Can Do Now
- Set SMART goals.
Write them down and keep them readily available with any other materials resulting from career research.
Specific – Set specific steps or sub-goals.
Measurable – Ask how much or how many to determine if the goal is measurable.
Attainable – The goal must be a challenge, but also achievable.
Relevant – The goal and the end result must be worthwhile to the individual.
Timely – The goal must have a clear timeline to help establish urgency. - Review tips.
Check out the tips CareerOneStop has for achieving goals, especially how it’s okay to reward yourself to stay motivated! - Create an occupation profile.
CareerOneStop’s Occupation Profile can provide a list of more than 950 occupations, as well as job titles within those occupations and pinpoint where in the country those jobs in that field will most likely be available. Your student can also find what careers are the fastest-growing and which ones have the most openings by state or nationwide. - Determine the need for a college degree.
One of the biggest decisions when it comes to attending college is deciding on a major. It’s the starting point to researching, visiting and deciding on the school that will offer the best return on your student’s investment. We’ll discuss the college selection process in future emails, but choosing a major is important for use with one of our own career evaluation tools. - Experience Return on College Investment.
If the selected career options require a college degree, ISL Education Lending’s Return on College Investment tool will help your student explore jobs held by others in a particular area of interest, as well as related college majors. The tool also provides the recommended education for a chosen career, the return on the investment in education, and the number of prospective job openings.
What Your Student Can Do Later
- Learn what jobs are available.
When fewer jobs are available, the number of applicants is larger. If the career choice has a lower availability rate, your student will need to be a stand-out candidate to compete with the others hoping to land only an interview. How will your student’s resume rise to the top of the stack? With more education? Certifications? Experience? Time to start thinking about that as well, but we’ll have more information for you in future emails. - Determine an anticipated lifestyle.
Your student most likely has the ideal future lifestyle in mind, but is it realistic for the future career choice? Many students have some fairly high standards of comfortability and convenience that might not match up to their career’s projected salary. Will that be something your student can manage?
What You Can Do
- Share your own experiences.
Talk with your student about your own goals – how you set and achieved them, and also what you learned along the way. What were your successes and setbacks? What kinds of adjustments were made along the way? What motivated you and how did you reward yourself? - Share in your student’s excitement.
Once a career path is determined, celebrate! It is an accomplishment, after all. However, now it’s time to focus on setting some SMART goals. - Talk about your own lifestyle.
Everyone’s household is different, but if you’re comfortable sharing information with your student about your earnings and how it relates to your housing and living costs, it may prove to be a very valuable life lesson. Everything comes with a cost, and by talking about any sacrifices you’ve had to make to get where you are today, your student might gain a heightened sense of appreciation.
Next Steps
Be sure to complete the survey questions at the end of this article to be entered into the 529 deposit giveaway!
Additional references, handouts and talking points are available in the right sidebar to use at your leisure. They may prove beneficial to reference now or after receiving future emails – we’ll leave it completely up to you. Use our emails like a recipe for a successful outcome — assemble the recommended ingredients and then follow accompanying directions to add flavor and depth.