Youth in Transition Toolkit:
What careers interest the youth? Learning about, seeing and trying out various career possibilities sends a message about high expectations and allows youth to make informed decisions about their career path.
Job exploration counseling
The National Technical Assistance Center on Transition (NTACT) offers a collection of curricula and lessons to help you provide job exploration counseling.
American Student Assistance offers blog posts and other resources on career exploration.
The Minnesota career fields, clusters and pathways career wheel (PDF) depicts skills, career fields, career clusters and career pathways to help job seekers understand a range of career opportunities.
Minnesota State CAREERwise provides information on exploring careers, planning for postsecondary education and finding a job. Minnesota State also supports GPS Lifeplan, which helps students approach goalsetting and find resources to achieve their goals.
Provided by the Described and Captioned Media Program, Map it: What comes next? is a free interactive training designed for transition-age students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The training focuses on three questions:
The Career and education explorer from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) helps youth get information about jobs and training options across the state. DEED offers other labor market insight as well, including data tools — which allows youth to search for specific types of labor data.
Federally supported career information sites include:
Help youth explore transportation careers in Minnesota at the Minnesota State Transportation Center of Excellence site.
Help youth explore information technology (IT) careers in Minnesota at the Minnesota State IT Center of Excellence site.
Help youth explore trade and manufacturing careers in Minnesota at Trades Hub.
BestPrep is a nonprofit agency that provides free programs to help sutdents build business, career and financial literacy skills. BestPrep facilitates mentorship opportuntieis, workplace tours and more.
Construct Tomorrow offers career exploration events across Minnesota.
The Institute for Educational Leadership offers a lesson plan on considering labor market information in your career choice (PDF).
Though not all career choices are based on current labor market information, it's important for youth to know where to find labor market information and how to understand which jobs are in demand, which industries are losing steam and how to make decisions based on growing career fields.