This year we have come up with a novel way for our homeschool teen career guidance.
[This article was originally posted on Wendy’s website, www.homeschool-curriculum-for-life.com which was discontinued in March 2015. It is republished here with her permission.]
Having an aversion to guidance counsellors after an unfortunate event with one during my own school years, I did not want to have someone tell my children that their test scores or personality type would determine their future careers.
Using real life as learning has always been high on our family’s agenda, so why not use real life and real people to expose them to as many careers as possible.
Knowing this was not a job for one mom, I roped some friends in who also had children in the same age bracket.
The first thing we did was brain storm all the people we knew who would be approachable for our teens to job shadow them or for them to simple come and talk to our teens.
We found that amongst just 7 of us we had access to:
Attorneys
Chefs
Beauty Therapists
Pilots
Vets
Hotel Managers
Accountants
Petro Chemical Engineers
Jockeys
Optometrists
Pharmacists
Real Estate Agents and more!
Next step was to find a day once a month that suited everyone, including the job specialist. This proved to be the most challenging thing!
Some of the professionals held the meeting in their home, others preferred to come to our home. We tried to make it work for the person doing the talk as they were doing us the favour.
The issues we wanted to cover were told in advance being:
- High school subject choice for this job?
- Where can the high school graduate study for this career?
- How long is the study period?
- What is the cost of the studies?
- What are the long term job prospects?
- What does this field of study cover?
Then after these pertinent issues were covered we encouraged the professional to talk from their hearts about why they were drawn into this career and their experiences in their chosen career.
So far it has been a fabulous exploration into homeschool teen career guidance and as they next 3 years of our children’s highschool at home goes, we hope to have many more such meetings.
Please be sure to look at the following:
Carol Topp, a qualified CPA (and homeschool mom!) has a series of books to help teens start their own businesses. I have read her first ebook entitled “Micro Business For Teens” and can recommend it for its solid advice, confidence building tone, unique ideas and thoroughness. In fact my 13 year old son took it to read himself and is now sparking with money making ideas!
You might also be interested in these pages on our site: