How Does Career Exploration Work?

In 1991, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided the University of Chicago with a grant to study career formation among adolescents. A research team of embarked upon a virtually unprecedented longitudinal study, the results of which were published in 2000 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow and Barbara Schneider, author of The Ambitious Generation, in their book Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work. They reported the following:

Career counseling, it seems, can no longer be limited to matching traits with slots but should help youth to develop flexible attitudes, creative problem-solving techniques, and fundamental habits that will allow them to prosper during changing times. These goals cannot be achieved by counselors alone but need to involve the entire educational institution as well as families and communities. The role of counselors might become that of providing information to principals, teachers, parents ad curriculum developers about the needs and realities of the workplace and about strategies for best preparing teenagers to meet future possibilities.

As presented above, their findings lead to the following recommendations:

1. Develop high school curricula in academic subjects that stress creativity, flexibility, and emotional intelligence. In the future it will be essential to establish more links between disciplines, to see commonalities among different subjects, and to master synthetic as well as analytic approaches to learning.
2. Encourage high schools to provide more instructional time in academic subjects and to use that time in ways that are intellectually engaging for students. Group projects should be utilized more widely, taking advantage of teenagers’ natural inclination to work together with peers.
3. Restructure school-to-work programs in high schools so that students come to realize that productive employment in the future will require continual training and learning. We need to develop in young people a passion for life-long learning.
4. Encourage intrinsic motivation and teach children to enjoy what they do for its own sake, not just for the sake of getting good grades. Children who enjoy overcoming challenges will seek out challenging situations in the future. They will be more likely to seize new opportunities, to seek new ways of doing things, to work on tasks that have unclear solutions and to inspire others to work on difficult problems. These are the characteristics that the workforce of the future will most urgently need.
5. Clarify the links between time use and future job options. Currently much of teenagers’ time is wasted. It is particularly important to make sure that children do not fall into the habit of feeling that what they do is meaningless—neither like work nor like play.
6. Find situations that are more play-like for disadvantaged youth. Students who perceived their life in more play-like terms were more likely to matriculate in selective postsecondary schools. The spontaneity and creativity associated with play is something we should support for all children, especially as this quality builds self-confidence and educational attainment.
7. Encourage parents to become more actively involved in their children’s lives. …Parents must learn more about their children’s interests and find opportunities to communicate high expectations and unstinting support. This kind of parental involvement requires parental attention, but without it teenagers will have a difficult time realizing their potential.

Parent participation in career exploration. Enlisting the collaboration of parents—and providing a practical tool for parents to use—serves two important purposes. First, it involves parents in an aspect of Authentic Learning that they can easily and naturally take on. In so doing, they also complement the students’ classroom and community-based experiences. Second, it provides a vehicle for meaningful and positive parent involvement—beyond fundraising, beyond parent conferences and even beyond volunteering in after school activities. While these are all crucial types of parent involvement, they are secondary to the core role that parents play as supporters and guides to their own children. Energizing and supporting parent involvement in career exploration acknowledges and honors the role of parents as the key players in the task of bringing children “over the line to adulthood”, as Robert Bly has said. An important factor in engaging parents is providing them with some specific tools and strategies to use in talking with their children that can maximize real communication and learning—for both the children and the parents. Louise Barbee of the Contra Costa County Office of Education, in her work for the East Bay STC Partnership, developed a guide for Career Coaching Kids for schools to use in working with parent organizations—or to use themselves.

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