Helping students become career-focused and career-committed.

Central to the message of the Career Choices curriculum is helping students become career-focused and career-committed while learning how to make effective decisions about their futures. Studies show that students who enter college or post-secondary training career-focused and career-committed are far more likely to graduate and transition into productive work that matches their education and training.

Building on the momentum started by the Career Choices experience.

In order to accomplish this, and to maintain the momentum started by a course involving Career Choices, it is critical that students revisit and revise their 10-year plans during their sophomore, junior, and senior years. The more students are asked to rethink and rework their plans, the more meaningful the plans become and the more comfortable students will be making decisions that involve change -- which is a crucial survival skill in the workforce of the 21st century.

Providing data-driven information about each student's plan that can be accessed quickly and easily. For advisory situations to function effectively, teachers, counselors, and advisors need quantitative information about each student and their unique education and career goals. The best guidance is provided when working from specific examples, rather than general or vague notions. If advice and mentoring is built on each student's identifiable goals, it will have more meaning. By having this information online, all stake holders can quickly access this indepth information so individual guidance can be provided easily.

For high school students it is learning "the process," rather than focusing on the end result, that counts.

Becoming career-focused and career-committed doesn't mean that students are making a final, lifelong career choices. Instead, they are learning an important decision-making process by pondering and answering the questions who am I, what do I want, and how do I get it. This is an explicit process they will use throughout their lives when faced with major decisions. Knowing this process in a step-by-step sequence exposes young people to sophisticated techniques and strategies not normally experienced at such a young age. The online 10-year plan, which allows for ongoing exposure to the process and updating of the plan, reinforces what they've learned so it becomes innate.

The plan must be meaningful if it is going to impact students' efforts. To be meaningful, it must be updated as students discover important aspects of themselves and the world around them.

As articulated in the November 2005 issue of Principal Leadership magazine, for a standards-based comprehensive guidance course like Career Choices to be effective, students' 10-year plans must be readily available to all teachers so each academic department can provide opportunities for students to rework their plans. Examples of this include:

A 10th-grade social studies department could work with its students to reassess their 10-year plans once they study globalization and its impact on the American workforce.

An 11th-grade English department can facilitate the annual re-editing of the plans once the students read a literary work in which a character struggles with his or her own life-planning issues.

As part of a senior independent study project, students could update their 10-year plans to use in college or employment interviews. Or, students could choose a service learning project in a career interest area, as identified in the current version of their plan.