Careers for High School Students
High school students who want to explore potential careers should first ask themselves what they enjoy and what they’re good at. This will help them narrow down their choices and focus on the careers that are right for them. For example, if you like being outdoors and working with animals, you might consider becoming a veterinarian or zookeeper. If you like working with people and helping others, you might consider becoming a teacher. Or if you enjoy designing things, you might want to become an architect or engineer.
Before starting your job search, make sure that you have gathered all of the information about the different types of careers open to high school students. You can find this information in books written for teenagers as well as online at your local library or job center’s website. When possible, talk with older people who work in various professions or attend career fairs where companies come together to meet with high school students who are interested in learning more about their company and possible career paths within it.
When deciding which type of career is right for you, keep these eight tips in mind: 1) Make sure that it fits into your interests 2) Make sure it fits within your budget 3) Make
Exploring Careers For High School Students
It’s an awesome thing to give teens motivation and purpose behind their education – experts say this can increase their focus, interest, and even get more of your students to graduate.
The thing is: most students can’t name very many careers or job types. It’s because they haven’t been exposed to tons of industries, careers, vocations, or even jobs.
That’s why career awareness and career exploration for students is so important at this stage in life.
These career sites for high school students will help them to first cast a broad net into career and skillset exploration, and then to narrow their lists down enough so that that they can do meaningful career and job research.
Helping High School Students Choose a Career
Before we jump into these great websites, let’s put a little structure to how you can help a high school student choose a career.
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Plus, let’s manage our expectations a bit. I mean, it’s not 100% likely that a high school student is able to pick out what they want to be (even after they go through all this career exploration) at this age.
And that’s okay!
I think it’s important to help them narrow down 2-4 possible fields, and then put in some research into those. Using the websites below.
Here are some steps to help high schoolers pick 2-4 career fields to research:
Step #1: Skillset Identification
First, you need to help a student figure out what their skill set is.
Step #2: Interests Identification
Then, you need to help them figure out what they’re interested in doing, that is a paid position.
Step #3: Match Skillset and Interests to Career Fields
Where these two things intersect is where they should be looking for careers and jobs.
BUT, they might have a ton of different industries/jobs/careers that come back from this stage.
So, they’ll need to narrow that list down to do meaningful career research.
Step #4: Narrow Careers Down
Once they’ve narrowed down to 3-5 different jobs, they’ll want to run each through a research phase to learn more.
Step #5: Research those Careers to Find Out More
Researching a career:
Income Ranges
Education Requirements
Skills Requirements
Different job types
Day in the Life
Reading career books for students
Let’s dive into how to do all of this, with some pretty awesome + free career sites for high schoolers.
Career Sites for High School Students – Skills Exploration
This section of career sites for high schoolers is dedicated to free online quizzes that will help your students figure out what their current skill set is, and which ones they might want to develop further.
- Princeton Review’s Career Quiz
screenshot of career test on princeton review’s career site
Students will need to register (for free), and then answer a series of 24 questions.
They’ll then receive one of four “interest colors” for “Your Interest” and “Your Style”:
Red: Expediting
Green: Communicating
Blue: Planning
Yellow: Administrating
For example, I received Yellow for both. Which means I’m interested in jobs that require organizing and systematizing, and my style is to work where in an orderly manner with few surprises (haha!).
You can then tab over to “Recommended Careers” for a list specific to your interest and style.
Bonus: One of my recommended careers? Is a small business owner…which I am. Woohoo!
- Career Girls Career Quiz
screenshot of career girls career quiz, free career resources for schools
Here’s a personality-based career quiz for girls that offers 35 different characteristics they can check off about themselves (multiple choice is totally allowed).
Then, based on those personality traits, they’ll receive a list of appropriate careers.
For example, I plugged in about 10 different ones about myself, and got the following list of potential careers:
Announcer
Real Estate Agent
Athletic Trainer
Physical Therapist
Social Worker
Human Resources Manager
Sociologist
Fitness Trainer
Emergency Management Director
Psychologist
- O*Net Interest Profiler
Gives you RIASEC interest levels, which correspond with different jobs.
Realistic
Investigative
Artistic
Social
Enterprising
Conventional
Exploring Careers For High School Students