Free What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles, Carol Christen, Jean M. Blomquist

informed decisions. To learn more about what a career coach can do for you, visit www.youthleadershipcareers.com .
    Excellent career coaching can also be found at www.jobfindingpartners.com .



5
    What Do I Do Now?
    MAKING THE MOST OF HIGH SCHOOL
    High school matters! And not as a boring waiting room until graduation or college, when “real life” begins. You can use your high school years to learn technical skills, put together academic and activity achievements to help you get into college, explore careers, and put together a detailed plan. Students usually know that to succeed they need reasonably good grades. What most don’t know is theimportance of making tentative career decisions and creating a plan for how to achieve career and life goals.
    Why do you need a detailed plan? Studies of students—whether they go to college or not—show that those who achieve their life and career ambitions have a detailed plan. The plan gives them focus. They know why they are in school and how their classes relate to their plan. They also know obstacles that are likely to come up and have created strategies for overcoming those obstacles.
    Does getting a job or starting a career seem light-years away? For some of you, that may almost be true. (We say “almost” because the future actually seems to come more quickly than we expect!)Transitioning from high school to your preferred career or a full-time job you enjoy can take up to ten years.This is one reason you want to start work on this transition while you are still in high school. You can use your high school classes and extracurricular activities to build a strong foundation for your first career pathway.
    Just like a savvy politician, you can use your time in high school to set up a “campaign” that will help you achieve your future career goals. This campaign includes increasing your awareness of the work world, developing job-search skills, creating a career portfolio, and considering whether you want or need to go to college. We’ll explore all of those things in this chapter. And because it’s good to think about what lies ahead, we’ll also take a brief look at what comes after high school.

Awareness of the Work World
    As you learn more about the world of work, your awareness of career possibilities and different kinds of jobs grows. All the work you’ve done in the preceding chapters—exploring your interests, skills, and preferences concerning work environments and people to work with, and identifying potential dream jobs—provides a solid foundation for your growing awareness.
    Even without realizing it, you’re probably already doing things that are helping your awareness to grow. You may, for example, be paying more attention to what people do to earn a living. You may take a career interest assessment that suggests some jobs you might like but didn’t know about previously. You may have older friends or siblings who have left school and started jobs that you didn’t even know existed. You may notice who enjoys their work, and who doesn’t.
    You can also help your awareness of the work world grow by focusing some of your high school experiences—class assignments, extracurricular activities, part-time or summer work—on possibilities for your future. Let’s take a brief look at some of your options.
    Class Assignments
    Need to do a book report? Read a book about a superstar in the industry that most interests you. Or pick one of the many helpful books listed at the end of this chapter. Needto do a report? Pick a profession, field, or industry that interests you and do a research paper. You might, for example, research which Fortune 500 companies were started by people who didn’t finish college. Need to do a presentation? Report on what you learned in preparing your parachute and conducting your information interviews. In doing a presentation like this, you not only fulfill a class requirement, but you may also help your friends and classmates