How to Help Your Child with Career Guidance? (Children Aged 8 and Adolescents up to Senior Year)
Career exploration for children and young adolescents is a process that ideally requires thoughtful and extended preparation. Starting as early as 8 to 10 years old, children begin to think about the careers they might want to pursue and why. It’s essential at this stage to encourage and guide them to discover their interests, build confidence, and consider multiple paths for their future without unnecessary pressure.
Approach the Topic as a World of Possibilities
To foster reflection, you can implement various strategies, but I’ve highlighted a few that are relatively easy to apply:
1. Encourage Self-Discovery: It's important to start by helping your child understand themselves better. Encourage them to explore diverse activities, passions, and interests through various extracurricular activities like clubs, sports, or the arts. These experiences can reveal hidden talents and natural preferences. However, it’s crucial to engage in discussions about what they genuinely enjoy about these activities.
2. Emphasize the Importance of School Subjects: Explain to your child how the subjects they study in school can translate into knowledge and skills for future careers. For example, mathematics could lead to careers in science or engineering, while history might lead to careers in teaching or research. Emphasize thinking about a career and an activity, not just a field of study or a specific path. Thinking about a career is about orientation; thinking about a path is about fitting in.
3. Foster Curiosity and Questioning: Encourage your child to ask questions about the jobs they encounter daily. What is the general activity, and why? Can they imagine what the daily routine might be like? These discussions can help them understand the diversity of existing professions and broaden their perspectives.
4. Involve Your Child in Practical Experiences: Everyday experiences around you are opportunities to talk about different careers, from the grocery store to the bank to a birthday at the go-kart track. Additionally, internships or job shadowing opportunities later on, provide concrete ways for your child to learn about various professions. These on-the-ground experiences are invaluable for giving a visual and environmental understanding of the work and refining their desires to envision careers that attract them.
5. Promote Gradual Reflection: It’s essential to remind your child that they don’t need to know exactly what they want to do right away. The important thing is to stay curious, explore, think about possibilities, and not hesitate to change their mind as they discover more.
6. Guidance from a Career Coach: If you feel your child needs more structured support to clarify their ideas and set an objective that naturally motivates them to invest in their schoolwork and improve their grades, coaching might be the solution. This type of personalized guidance helps your child structure their thoughts, build confidence in their choices, and advance calmly in developing and creating their career project.
Alternatively, my self-coaching manual "Choose Your Career in 5 Days" can be a good starting point, but individualized follow-up brings an additional dimension, structure, and explanations for those who need it.
