Homeschool Career Exploration: Discovering Interests and Skills

Are you beginning Homeschool Career Exploration? Time for discovering interests and skills.

Homeschool Career Exploration: Discovering Interests and Skills

Every homeschool high schooler is different. Some are born with clear interests and obvious skills. However, many teens need to do some Career Exploration in order to discover and develop their interests and skills. That’s okay! Just like there’s not ONE right way to homeschool high school, there’s not ONE right way for teens to understand who they are and what they are about.

Some of my children knew at an early age what their career interests were and stuck with them into adulthood!

However, some of them had no clue whatsoever what they were even interested in and totally doubted their God-given skills and gifts. They knew they would be wise to discover their interests and skills or they would waste time in college or career training. (Listen to this episode of Homeschool Highschool Podcast about teens who don’t have a clue.)

Fortunately for my homeschool high schoolers, they had a mom who is a Career Coach!

I told my clueless teens that we needed to work on a comprehensive Career Exploration program. This would include:

• Identifying Role Models: The kind of people teens view as influential are clues to their interests.
• Identifying Interests: Teens need to explore several interests during homeschool high school.
• Acknowledging Skills and Giftings: God has given all teens some kind of gift. They are also at the age they need to develop life skills and skill in their gifts.
• Learning from Experiences: Teens should also take time to note what they have learned from experiences. What valuable, difficult, fun, adventurous, boring experiences have been important to them (whether for good or for avoiding in the future)?
• Identify Values: What is important to your teen? Faith? work/life balance? fun? outdoors?
• Capturing Mission: Creating a mission statement.

My homeschool high schoolers were no different than many teens. They just don’t know themselves well enough yet.

Here are some ways to help teens discover their interests and skills:

• Do new things. Weekly take a field trip to any kind of new place. New things help teens’ brains to grow and new experiences help them learn about themselves, whether it directly impacts future career choices or not.
• Increase volunteer activity. Pick some new areas at church and outside of church and volunteer their several times.
• Do some new crafts, models or artwork. Set up some trains for Christmas, take on a new art project, build a bird house.
• Learn a new home maintenance skill.
• Learn a new cooking or housekeeping skill.
• Take a computer course. Look at EdX for some free courses, or at Code Apprentice a program by a homeschool graduate.
• Interview relatives and friends about what they like and don’t like about their jobs and careers.
• For even more ideas, check out these ways our friend, Sue Sobczak, developed her teens’ unique interests.
• Here are some ideas for courses that count as Career Exploration.

As they steadily work on these things, homeschool high schoolers will begin discovering their interests and skills- a good start to Career Exploration.

For the comprehensive Career Exploration course my kids used (as well as hundreds of other homeschool high schoolers), download 7Sisters Career Exploration Bundle. Your teens will be glad you did.

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Homeschool Career Exploration: Discovering Interests and Skills