High School Career Planning: What You Need to Know

High school career planning encompasses all of a student's interests, the steps they take, and the career planning resources they use to translate those factors into an eventual career choice. Career planning can also involve high school elective courses, summer or part-time jobs, internships, and more.

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How High School Students Discover What Drives Them

School counselors know that high school students don't have it all figured out yet, and that high school career planning is a discovery process. Students may change their minds about their future careers many times. The key is to help students develop their interests and talents, so they can be successful no matter what career they choose.

Students can start by identifying key preferences:

• Favorite subjects
• Clubs and activities they enjoy and why
• Issues they care about
• Financial goals
• Other major life goals

Gaining Experience in a Career Field

Students receive plenty of theoretical knowledge in high school. That knowledge should be matched with high-quality, practical experience. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) lists several ways students can gain practical, real-world experience while planning for a future career:

Internships

These combined learning and work experiences may be paid or unpaid and completed for course credit or independently. A hallmark of a valuable internship is a real-world sampling of what to expect in a particular job or career field.

Summer or Part-Time Jobs

The BLS found that teenagers and young adults work in summer or part-time jobs in many industries, from leisure and hospitality (25% of those surveyed) and retail (19%), to manufacturing (7%) and construction (4%). This is a great way for students to "try on" jobs and potential careers while gaining valuable experience and skills.

Other High School Career Planning Activities

Schools offer a plethora of teams, clubs, and activities that help students engage in future career planning. Some student organizations, like Future Business Leaders of America, are specifically set up to help students develop career readiness skills. Students may also volunteer at a house of worship or non-profit organization, gaining valuable experience while giving back to the community. Some schools require volunteer work for graduation due to the many benefits for students.

Career Planning = Career Training

Preparation is important to any serious career planning process. High school students successfully train for future careers with appropriate high school coursework. School counselors can help students avoid future remedial coursework by helping them set realistic goals based on the educational requirements and skills needed by future employers.

Students can begin their formal career training process by developing important personal commitments and seeking advice:

• Commit to completing all school assignments on time
• Talk with adults about what they like (and don't like) about their careers
• Discuss future career plans with parents/caregivers and school counselors, and consider advice

Some students may benefit from more rigorous career-based programs, such as those provided by vocational/career centers. Nearly 75% of high school students who don't go to college go straight into the workforce after graduation. These students may benefit more from educational programming geared specifically toward career planning and career training than some of their peers.

Other students may see the military as an option. Students who enter the military after graduation receive valuable job training that can lead to industry certifications and possible career paths following their service.

Locating the Right High School Career Planning Resources

Education is highly decentralized in the United States, but that means each state and, frequently, each local school district often develop and publish their own high school career planning resources. Students thus have access to many resources relevant to their interests.

Some states, like Ohio, offer educational resource pages that provide links to everything from state-sponsored vocational sites to recommended activities and timelines for students and families.

Individual school districts may also create portals where students can access career planning resources. For example,one school district provides information about their partner career center, potential military careers, job shadowing programs, job search resources, and several career assessment tools and other career planning options. How robust is your own portal? What career planning tools might your students need on your website? Here are just a few possibilities:

• FunEducation's Free Career Test
• The U.S. Department of Labor's Skills Matcher
• Student career resources from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• A state career profile tool, like this one from Ohio Means Jobs
• What Career is Right For Me
• O*NET's Interest Profiler

Your portal and these resources can be demonstrated during classroom career counseling lessons, embedded strategically in your school's learning management system, and continuously promoted on social media.

High School Career Planning is Both Personal and Purposeful

High school career planning is a broad topic that ultimately begins with the personal needs of each student. From there, high school career planning proceeds with purpose. The result? High school graduates are ready to make a seamless transition to a career of their choice, confident in the skills they possess, at a time and manner of their choosing.

If your school is interested in new ways to improve the learning experience for children, you may also be interested in automating tasks and streamlining processes so your teachers have more time to teach. Education Advanced offers a large suite of tools that can help:

• Cardonex, our master schedule software, helps schools save time building master schedules. Many schools once spent weeks using whiteboards to organize students, teachers, and classrooms so students could get their preferred classes and graduate on time. However, Cardonex now can be used to automate this task and deliver 90% of students' first-choice classes.
• Testhound, our test accommodation software, helps schools coordinate thousands of students across all state and local K-12 schools, while taking into account dozens of accommodations (reading disabilities, physical disabilities, translations, etc.) for students.
• Embarc, our curriculum mapping software, helps teachers quickly analyze whether their curriculum is aligned with state and national standards and share best practice curriculum plans with other teachers and parents to reduce duplication and keep everyone up to date.