Career Exploration for High School Students
Exploring career paths is an exciting undertaking. You don’t need to know your future career yet, but learning more about a few that interest you will help set you up for success.
Career exploration is the process of identifying your skills and interests, mapping them into a handful of careers, and further investigating those careers through research and hands-on experience. It may feel daunting to figure out where to start, but we are here to break it down for you into easy, manageable steps.
How to Do Career Exploration
First, carve out time to interview yourself and write down your responses about your interests, skills, and lifestyle goals. Here are some example questions:
Interests:
What are your favorite school subjects?
What do you like to do in your free time?
What topics do you find yourself continuously curious about?
Skills:
What are your hard skills? (The skills that can be easily quantified and measured, such as foreign languages, programming languages, data analytics, digital design, writing, and project management).
What are your soft skills? (Personal attributes such as creativity, verbal communication, written communication, problem-solving, and teamwork).
What do teachers, family, and friends tell you are your strengths and skills?
Lifestyle goals:
Do you want to go to community college or university?
What kind of lifestyle do you want to have in the future?
What is your ideal work-life balance?
The next step is to map your answers to careers that align with your skills and interests. Consider using a tool such as the US Department of Labor’s My Next Move database which lists hundreds of careers with job descriptions, desired skills/abilities, and average salaries. You can also ask teachers, parents, and other mentors to help you with the matching process.
Finally, create a shortlist of the most exciting careers you mapped and further investigate them. A hands-on experience such as job shadowing, an internship, or part-time employment is the best way to find out what your daily work would be like. You can call local businesses or ask teachers, parents, and friends to connect you to professionals in the jobs that interest you.
It is sometimes easier to ask professionals for a job shadowing experience or an unpaid internship first before seeking paid employment, but it all depends on the careers in which you are interested and what opportunities are available in your area. Do not be afraid to ask!
If you are not able to get hands-on experience, you could still organize a telephone or in-person informational interview to ask a worker about their profession.
Here are some example questions you could ask them:
What kinds of tasks do you do on a typical day?
What do you like most and least about your job?
What kind of skills/personality traits are desired for your job?
Do you have any advice on how someone my age should prepare for your type of job?
Final Thoughts on Career Exploration
Proactively exposing yourself to different working environments now will help you gain clarity on your goals and the planning needed to achieve them. UPchieve is ready to help you, too. Consider signing up for a free college counseling session!