Helping teens choose a career path

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

At age 16, John Cameron was at a career crossroads.

He was interested in becoming a surgeon, but engineering was also an attractive option.

As a junior in high school last year, he started to feel the pressure to choose a direction. He feared he might end up floundering when he went to college, jumping from one major to another. This thought worried him, and it also worried his mother, Laura, who already had one kid in college.

“Due to the cost of college today, I didn’t want him on the five- or six-year plan, not knowing what he wanted to do,” she says. 

She decided to be proactive. She took John to a career-counseling firm that would test his skills and help him choose the best career path.

For $800, John was put through a battery of aptitude tests spanning two days, everything from cognitive reading to dexterity. After the results were calculated, he and his mom sat down for a nearly two-hour rundown on his performance with a counselor at CareerVision, a career counseling and assessment organization in Glen Ellyn, Ill.

Would he make a great surgeon? Or was he best suited for engineering? Maybe he was cut out for something totally different.

For many teens and their parents, figuring out a career path early on has become increasingly important. Some parents are turning to counseling services such as CareerVision for their teens, sometimes as young as 13, to help give their kids a career reality check.

Some critics warn it’s yet another example of how we’re putting too much pressure on children to grow up fast. But parents argue they’re just looking out for their families’ futures.

Honing a teen's career goals
Tough economic times and the skyrocketing cost of college tuition has put the fire under many parents to help their kids’ figure out career goals so they don’t waste a ton of mom and dad’s money in college — and to get them on the road to making a good paycheck in their early 20s.

“The cost of college and indebtedness incurred has caught the eyes of parents as their job security is challenged, and managing career transitions is a highly valued skill,” says Rich Feller, counseling and career development
professor at Colorado State University. “No longer can the majority of students with ‘any’ degree find an easy match to specific jobs or management training programs. For the first time, the college degree premium has been challenged.”

Sean Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens,” adds: “As the global marketplace evolves, suddenly our kids are not just competing against neighbors for good jobs, but competing against someone in China and India.”

Often, he says, kids 13 to 18 don’t listen to their parents, and a counselor can help set them straight. “I think it can hone their plans,” he says.

Indeed, John Cameron, now 17 and a senior in high school, believes CareerVision helped him.

Some of the specific career suggestions he received from the counselor included: biomedical engineer, physician, civil/structural engineer, college professor and meteorologist.

What about surgeon?

“I didn’t do too well on the finger dexterity portion of test,” says Cameron. “The counselor said I probably wouldn’t be able to be a surgeon. I didn’t have the hands for it. But she suggested I look into dermatology, or internal medicine. Something along those lines.”

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