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Then came his light-bulb moment. Why not create a tool that offered better career information for high-school students? He and his friend Matt McQuillen founded Career Cruising, a Toronto-based company devoted to creating interactive software to guide teenagers through their career options. That was 1997.
Today, Career Cruising has grown to 45 employees. High-school students in every province and U.S. state use its software. In Kentucky, Career Cruising has been fully integrated into the curriculum. Students from Grade 6 to12 develop a plan that will weave their career interests into their academic learning. They are accountable for following the plan.
Last year, Career Cruising teamed up with another Canadian success story, The Real Game. It is a role-playing exercise geared toward middle-school students. They assume characters in make-believe scenarios, playing out the consequences of their career choices.
Phil Jarvis, a longtime career educator, has refined and promoted the Real Game for many years. He says it gives children permission to dream about their future and imagine themselves as adults.
“It becomes very clear to them that if any of these things they would really like to have in the future are going to be possible, there are some things they’re going to have to do in the present to get there.”
If The Real Game is about self-discovery, Career Cruising gets down to actual jobs. It connects teens’ interests with up-todate career information. A 15-year-old who is curious about working as an aircraft mechanic can read an interview with one, learn about the skills required, working conditions, earnings and the career path to becoming one.
“Once someone knows what they want to do, once they see a future for themselves that they’re excited about, they’re a different person,” says Harris. “You can give them purpose in school — right now.” THE QUESTION IS, does good information alone launch a teenager on a career path? Meijers believes information is useful, but only when young people are ready for it.
“They make use of the information but only after they have made the choice on a gut level.”
Meijers says the indispensable ingredient is experience.
He compares making a career choice to finding a romantic partner. We don’t begin by reading up on the conditions of the relationship market. We start by dating, by gaining experience. For a student to make a career decision that is “heartfelt and lasting, you need to create opportunities for experiential learning — especially in the workplace.”
High school students crave hands-on experience, according to the research of Peter Dietsche of the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). He recently conducted focus groups with Grade10 students in Ontario. “Once they identified potential career opportunities, they wanted to be able to validate their interest and the reality of that career by actually going out and experiencing it.”
This is known as “work tasting.” It might be job-shadowing, workplace visits, volunteering or talking to somebody who is actually employed in an occupation to get an insider’s view.
The most effective work tasting is a coop placement of many weeks on a job site. It is a chance to try things out, to solve problems posed by adults who are neither teachers nor parents. It is also an opportunity to learn the soft skills that employers value highly, such as punctuality, comportment and clear communication.
The beauty of a co-op program is that it gives teenagers a chance to find out what they don’t want as much as what they do.
Co-op placements act as bridges to a larger world at a time when adolescents yearn for independence. That may account for the high rating that co-op students give their experience. Unfortunately fewer than 20 per cent of high school students enrol in co-op or youth apprenticeship programs, according to a national survey of guidance counsellors.
There are some common explanations for this. There is a stigma attached to co-op programs. Parents, fellow students and teachers dismiss them as an easy credit for low academic achievers.
The course-credit system also poses an obstacle. Students meeting the course requirements for university entrance often find it difficult to fit a co-op into their timetable.
All this is a lost opportunity, one that would lead to clearer career decisions. But there is a remedy. Make co-ops a compulsory credit. Education ministries might set a series of intermediate targets for schools to meet as a transitional step, but the goal should be full participation.
CAREER EDUCATIONin Canada needs to improve. It is on the radar of most provincial departments of education. But like all things educational in Canada, it is a patchwork — fragmented by provincial jurisdiction.
In some provinces, career studies courses are mandatory. However, an estimated one-third of schools across the country do not require students to take a career studies course.
Even where courses are mandatory, a good policy may get lost through poor execution. Take Ontario, for example. Grade10 high school students must take a half-credit career studies course. But according to Greg Murray, a career educator with the Halton Industry Education Council, the course is “often delivered by teachers filling out their timetables, rounding it out. They don’t have real expertise in it.”
There are many places to put the blame for young adults who find themselves without a career plan
The lack of expertise may also be true for the person most responsible for delivering career services in schools — the guidance counsellor. Only in Quebec must guidance counsellors meet certified standards in the field of career development.
Generally speaking, professions adopt standards to ensure clients a level of competence, knowledge and ethical behaviour. Canadian career development professionals, that is, those who operate outside the school system, are moving in this direction. It is time guidance counsellors did the same.
In 2009, a study for the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation found other unsettling gaps in the delivery of career education in schools.
Guidance counsellors spent too much time on non-guidance activities such as administration. In the worst case, Saskatchewan guidance teachers reported that they spent 47 per cent of their time on paperwork.
Even when guidance counsellors found time to help students, they were spread thin. In Ontario, each guidance counsellor serves about 400 students. In some provinces, the number is higher. Students told OISE’s Dietsche that they went to guidance counsellors for course selection, but rarely for career guidance.
“A lot of students had difficulty access- ing counsellors,” Dietsche says.
The Millennium study also found that schools were falling short in helping parents understand career choices. Only one-third of schools offered career education workshops for parents.
Parents and their children deserve better on every count.
THERE ARE PLENTY of places to put the blame for young adults who find themselves adrift, without a career plan, once they’ve completed their education. Some of it must rest squarely on the shoulders of the young. Chalk up some of it to early adulthood being a time of tasting what life has to offer, a time when young adults try on different roles and experiences to learn about themselves.
But there are two other possibilities for career drift: paralysis and not wanting to repeat their parents’ mistakes.
Linda Duxbury says young adults are recoiling from their parents’ lives. Duxbury is a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University and a keen observer of the generational differences in the workplace.
The way young adults see it, she says, “my mother’s got a drinking problem. My dad’s on psychotropic drugs. My parents got divorced. Why would I want their life? Why would I want to give my soul to you so that you can downsize me in six months? I don’t think so.”
Meanwhile, Mark Franklin, a career-development practitioner in Toronto, has spoken to hundreds of young adults who are paralyzed because they feel, incorrectly, that they have to make a decision “for the rest of their life.”
That’s why the advice of the Halton Industry Education Council in Ontario is worth heeding. HIEC has been the linchpin of career education in the Burlington area for more than two decades.
Michelle Murray, its director of operations, says the council tells kids “it’s all about the journey, and that your career path is not a direct line. It’s just really letting them know that you can change your mind over time. You are not committing to something in Grade 11 that you’re going to need to see through until you’re 65. Explore and get to know all your options.”
In other words, get experience. Neil Sandell spent a year writing and researching the issue of youth unemployment as part of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. Follow Sandell on Twitter: @youngnjobless. His website is youngandjobless.com