Find what you want. Go after what is really important to you.

As adults, we too often concern ourselves with helping young people become "realistic" at the expense of their dreams. Reality will impose itself on these students of its own accord; we do not need to accelerate this process. We need to help them map the steps and provide the tools and strategies required to move toward their dreams. Students may not live out their visions, but they should be able to strive for them and perhaps find new career paths as a result.

Identify your values, beliefs, and interests, and, more importantly, develop ways to continually re-assess them throughout your life.

Life is about change and growth, and careers need to reflect the changes in ourselves as well as the world around us. We need to help young people keep their eyes open for opportunities that will allow them to fulfill their values, beliefs, and interests. We need to help them recognize that such fulfillment comes from all parts of life. Most of us are not, after all, completely fulfilled by work alone. Numerous lessons in this curriculum help students become more self-aware and identify who they are becoming. These lessons also teach strategies for looking at oneself in the future, a key skill for life.

Focus on the journey; life is not a destination.

One of the reasons that the field of career development has been preoccupied with helping individuals select appropriate career destinations is that we want to help people find meaningful and fulfilling work. In doing so, however, we often under-emphasize the meaningfulness of the journey towards that career destination. We must make great efforts to help people better fulfill their values, beliefs, and interests with every decision they make.

We should help people move away from feeling a need to correctly make the BIG decision ("What should I be when I grow up?") and move toward examining the immediate and enduring affects of the many decisions they'll make along the way. Almost every decision can be viewed as a potential career decision: what courses to take, what intramural sports to choose, what extracurricular lessons to undertake, even what clothes to buy. When we help a student decide something, therefore, we are in some sense helping them make career decisions. This may, in fact, take some of the pressure off. It removes the paralyzing need to make the BIG decision and therefore run the risk of making the BIG mistake.

Learning is life-long.

In education we know about "lifelong learning" and its importance. Unfortunately, many people cringe when they hear "lifelong learning." People who have had limited success with formal education and who are, therefore, anxious about "lifelong learning" need to know that most learning does not occur in formal settings.

So often we have miscommunicated the message "stay learning even after you are out of school" as "go to college." For many, universities are wonderful places to learn. We need to communicate the "stay learning" message so that all students leaving school are already on an active path of personal learning, regardless of whether they are learning through their hearts, hands, or heads.

People also need ways to track their learning experiences. Individuals continually accumulate assets through learning, but few people have methods by which they can identify, record, and organize these assets. Consequently, they often do not recognize and acknowledge the learning they have achieved. We need to encourage students to use Career Plan to track the accomplishments they achieve. You will see suggestions throughout this curriculum for items to include in Career Plan.

Access your allies. The people in your family, school, and community whom you respect and trust are your allies in career development.

This brings us to the importance of community. Many people do not feel part of a community and do not know how to create one for themselves. Many youth, in particular, see the labor market as something external, "out there," and distant. They do not realize that it surrounds them, and is represented by their neighbors, friends' parents, and parents' friends. These people are often willing and able to be a valuable resource to youth, supporting their career journey, yet often they appear to have little ability to connect with each other. Many lessons in this curriculum target helping students acquire this understanding and these community connections.

Approach teaching career development as a joyful unfolding of your own learning and discovery, and model the concepts described above in the way you teach. You can feel confident that your students will have a meaningful and exciting career development experience as they absorb the values you bring, the behavior you model, and the information resources you share.