Research has shown that when children are in the midst of choosing a path, it is their parents who have the greatest influence on their career planning.
What is Career Planning?
Career planning is a combination of one’s life experiences including one’s work role, community role, as well as one’s learning and leisure experiences.
Career planning with your children is about helping them to develop their roles and to use their experiences to create the life they want to be. Also, since these roles and experiences are forever changing, it is important to understand that career planning is very dynamic.
As your children journey through life, they will continue to evaluate and adjust their career plans in response to external factors such as a shift in interests or a change in life circumstances.
There are five messages developed by career planning experts as a foundation of career and life planning. These messages are:
- Â Follow the Heart.
- Â Access your allies.
- Change is Constant.
- Learning is lifelong
- Focus on the Journey.
# Follow the heart: A well-pursuing dream provides motivation, direction, and helps to clarify what is really important to people. Let your children dream. Their dreams shape their goals. Allow them to use the energy to learn the skills and take the risks needed to make their dreams or any part of them a reality.
# Access your allies: As you navigate the process of career planning and its challenges, you will quickly realize you cannot do everything alone. It is important to find allies for yourself as much as for children. Allies come in many different forms. Some will be with you for a long time and others will help you with a specific situation. However long they are in your life, it is important that you know who you can turn to for support. Remember to involve people who play a major role in your children’s lives such as family, relatives, neighbors, teachers, friends, or career advisors.
# Change is constant: Both in work and in life, change is a constant force. Change can also create opportunities. Being flexible, versatile, and adaptable can harness the power of change to build career services.
# Learning is lifelong: Learning is a continuous life process. Learning, skills development, and work are intertwined activities that your children will engage in a continuous cycle of career-building experiences.
# Focus on the Journey: Life is a journey of experiences with destinations or goals as stopping points along the way. Career building requires attention to goals and to all that occurs on the journey towards these goals. As your children continue their career journeys, they may achieve their original goals, or revise them and set new goals.
It is important to know how the workplace has changed and these five messages no longer reflect the traditional messages of career planning from years age.
The Career Planning Process
It is important to become familiar with the steps involved in the career planning process not only to use now but also in the future. These steps are:
Step 1: Know Yourself
In this step, your children gather information about themselves. The purpose is to ” tune in ” and identify their interests, work values, skills, innate talents, and learning styles. This is an important exercise since people who choose occupations to match their interests, values, and skills to enjoy their work. They also tend to achieve their career goals and personal goals.
Step2: Network Allie’s Explore work opportunities
Armed with the information gathered about your children and their dreams, the next step is generating a list of career options for them. This can be done by exploring career choice where children relate their career with subjects, Doing Research to investigate information about the world of work by the parents as it broadens the scope of opportunity for their children, Conducting Information Interviewing face to face with someone who is actually doing a job.
Step3: Â Education and Train
Once your children have a goal, they will need a plan to achieve it. This is a critical step to achieve it. This is a critical step in the career planning process. Armed with self-knowledge, a vision of a preferred future, and an opportunity to have explained various occupations your children must now make choices about education and training pathways. To do this, it is best to review the information your children have gathered on various courses and institutes offering them and discuss how each occupation fits with these sources of studies.
Step4: Organize Study, Develop Skills:
The study curriculum of the students must be organized by creating a personalized subject wise schedule for the student. Parents and children have to identify, acquire, enhance, and evaluate the compulsory domain knowledge and transferable skills using industry-standard parameters.
Step5: Gain Work experience, Create Career Portfolio:
Volunteering is another opportunity to learn new skills, as well as having a new experience. Volunteering allows your children to discover work that they may enjoy or may not enjoy. Volunteering also your children to meet new people and expand their network. A career portfolio is a tangible collection of evidence or artifacts, that reflect your children’s interests, abilities, knowledge, and creative potential which are used to organize their education skills, work experience, accolades, and acknowledgments. As a collection of information, a portfolio is an excellent organizational tool during the career planning process. People use a career portfolio to get desired jobs with higher salaries and to track personal development.
Parents are the greatest influence of teens in their career path. Parents are in the position to help their children and they have the resources and tools to help them as the career coach to their children by keeping current important, researching to find out what career is growing and which one is shrinking and understanding what is happening in the world of work that can help their children find their dream job.