By LeeAnn Bernier-Clarke MEd, NCC, NCCC

Who will earn a higher starting salary: an accountant, a nurse or an elementary school teacher?

Which career will experience the largest projected job growth in the first decade of the 21st century: truck drivers, social workers or computer engineers?

By which source of career information are teenagers most influenced: their friends, parents, teachers or guidance counselors?

It is likely that neither your teen, your child's teachers, friends, guidance counselors nor parents would know or guess the correct answers to the first two questions.

labor market trends dictate high school and college curriculum development and admissions standards in many countries. But North Americans, in general, are barely aware of them. We don't consider them in training our future workforce, and we generally ignore them when making personal career decisions that will affect our future work satisfaction and overall well-being.

It's important information. The composition of our workforce, the nature of jobs and their related fluctuations over time and space are meticulously tracked by the Bureau of labor Statistics and other sources. Government, business and industry rely heavily upon this information for short- and long-term planning, and it is readily available for all to see and use.

The average high school graduate has "job-content familiarity" with approximately 10 career fields. They have basic knowledge of what their parents and teachers do. They know what they see on television, which depicts a very narrow range of fields, including doctors, lawyers, rock stars, athletes, police officers and a variety of illegal "jobs." Most teens know you can study about and work with computers.

That's about it!

If asked to write down job titles, the average teen will produce about 30. You can try this at home. Yet there are over 12,000 job titles in the U.S. labor market.

I am a career counselor and I love my work. Through almost 18 years of practice in several different settings, I have maintained both a strong conviction that I was born to do this work and a passion for the field. However, when I graduated from college, I didn't even know the field existed. I found out about it quite by chance, and just happened to move near a university that offered a graduate program that could prepare me for it.

How different the quality of my life would have been if I had never found such an excellent career fit! What teens (and their parents) don't know about career opportunities and labor market trends can truly hurt them. These crucial life decisions need not be left to chance.

In Search of Good Information

In the mid-1990s, a doctoral candidate from the University of New Hampshire asked my opinion about the results of a survey she'd sent to a "cross-section" of U.S. high school seniors to determine their career information awareness. Asked where they got information about jobs and careers, students' responses indicated that their primary sources were their friends, parents, teachers and guidance counselors, in that order. A small number indicated the library, but only a handful listed any specific print or electronic resources.

Teenage friends are the least-informed source. We've already discussed where they get their information! Your child's future is too important to rely on uninformed, idle speculation.

Teachers and guidance counselors, typically, have little work experience outside the education environment. Many go directly from college to the classroom. Most college teacher education curricula do not include career development course work. Though career education is a hot topic, and has been mandated by most educational reform legislation over the past decade, limited progress has been made in practice.

Driven by high stakes testing, our high schools focus on teaching content rather than context, and devote little time to student career development topics. Some school systems, spurred on by educational reform measures, offer in-service training to provide educators with career development information and skills. Some teachers strive to include occupational relevance in their teaching. However, these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

A Parent's Role

Parents, most of whom have held several different jobs, are usually more aware of workforce diversity than teachers are. Some of us follow the stock market, which gives us good insight into industry fluctuations. If you're reading this, it's safe to assume you're skilled at using the Internet to locate information.

You hold the keys. It's time to share your workforce knowledge with your kids. It is important that we as parents take the lead in sharing what we know and locating other good labor market information resources with our kids. They're not getting it in school nor (as they say) on the streets.

Fortunately, it's easy to find excellent labor market trend information on the Internet. It is by far the best and most current source for career information research.

A World of Possibilities

Exploring career and labor market trend information on the Internet can open up a world of possibilities for our teens. It can provide:

• A window into the world of work where kids learn about jobs and industries they never knew existed.
• Information about the personality traits, skills, education or training required to do different jobs, which teens can relate to what they know about themselves, what they enjoy and what they do well.
• Insights about work environments, salary ranges, favorable industries and geographic locations for career fields. These encourage kids to think about the lifestyle implications of career choices.
• labor market supply and demand data and projections. You can use these to determine whether any given career field will be greatly in demand or highly competitive when your 15-year-old graduates from college.
• Knowledge of which industries and geographic locations those jobs will become available within.

Online labor market information resources are so plentiful it's hard to know where to begin. The Occupational Outlook Handbook is a great site to get you started, and it will lead you to dozens more -- including most of the U.S. Department of labor and Bureau of labor Statistics sites.

Oh, by the way, did you know that a college graduate with a bachelor's degree in nursing would command a higher starting salary than either an accountant or teacher with the same level degree?

Also, there will be more new jobs for truck drivers than computer engineers or social workers. Now that's something to think about as we prepare our daughters and sons to assume their places in the workforce of the 21st century!

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