Many students do not have a clue what they want to do after graduating from high school, so they require some assistance in choosing a career path. Sometimes high school students make quick decisions and choose a career path without first exploring the numerous options available to them. Often students feel no one wants to take the time to help them find a career path or they assume one will emerge over time. Students need someone to help them research occupations that are matches to their interests, their skills and their strengths, and how they learn the best. They need help locating and gathering information about the current occupations that are out in today’s job market. Students cannot choose a career path until they know what options exist for them. High school students need to advocate for themselves by asking a teacher, a counselor or a parent for help in developing a career path. Students need to understand who they are and what they want, before they can start exploring career options. Once they have the information about who they are, they can begin to search for occupations that are good matches for them.
Before a student can select a post-secondary educational path, they need to discover who they are. Each high school student needs to be seen as an individual person with different interests, strengths, skills, and learning styles. Every student, from ninth grade through twelfth grade, needs the opportunity to develop an individual career path that is designed for them to be successful in the job market. Time needs to be dedicated every school year for each high student to explore careers in depth to find the occupations that are a good fit for them. Checking Out Career Paths with Chaz, is an in-depth, self-discovery program designed to first gather specific information on each student about their learning style, their career interests, and their skills. Then the student can use this specific information while exploring occupations to find occupations that are a good match for them. This program uses the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website that gives an in-depth look at hundreds of occupations and provides a detailed summary for each occupation. With this information, students complete a matching activity that allows them to match their interests, strengths, skills, and learning styles to a few occupations to find some good matches. This begins their ongoing discovery of occupations that may a good fit them in the future.