Parents, you play a very important role in your child's career exploration and planning. A career focus will add purpose to a child's studies. Here are some tips to get involved.

• Encourage your child to investigate a variety of careers and jobs.
• Stress to your child that school is his or her work. Attendance is very imporant.
• Explore with your child his or her personal talents, strengths, likes and dislikes. The more he/she knows about himself, the easier it will be for him/her to recognize the career possibilities.
• Help your child experience as many different work situations as possible. Through school employers, friends and relatives, have your child take advantage of both formal and informal work exposure programs.
• Encourage your child to research careers on the internet and through school or library resources.
• Help organize work-based learning activities for your child's class that relate classroom learning to the world of work.
• Help your child volunteer for a charity or community organization.
• Encourage your child to participate in job shadowing, internships, career workshops and other career oriented activities at school.
• Encourage your child to find summer/seasonal employment.
• Encourage your child to take courses that give him/her the opportunity to apply skills-technology, accounting, journalism, marketing, etc.
• Help your child explore career opportunities that were once considered only for males or only for females. There are often excellent opportunities for persons entering non-traditional career fields.
• Help your child begin to keep a portfolio. Help him/her to choose the contents.
• Review classification of skills and help your child determine where his or her skills fit: doer, thinker, creator, helper, organizer, persuader. Give definitions of each. Discuss and list the career possibilities under each category.
• Help your child see the connections between learning and working. His/her achievemet is likely to be much higher.

View pictures of parents and students at Board Shadowing Night 2006