Tips for parents on careers advice:

1. Notice and name your teen’s skills

Is your teenager really good with people? Mention that they have strong social skills. People skills, by the way, people skills are something that employers are constantly crying out for – people skills, interpersonal skills. Are they avid readers? Mention how people who read a lot have strong critical thinking skills. Is your teen great at Fortnite? Mention that the game is developing their problem solving skills, and potentially, their coding skills. Try and get in the habit of noticing and naming what they have natural skill and ability in. That’s who they are and that’s what they need to know about themselves.

2. Grow your own network of contacts

Grow your own network of contacts and then introduce your kids to interesting people. This one will be useful both now as they are deciding what to do after secondary school and later as they are looking for work in their chosen field. We have a great resource we give to students who want to contact people – it includes a sample email and 10 or so great questions they can ask to get relevant career information.

3. Find neutral sources of information

The ability to locate information is another really important career development skill. Now, remember that you are not neutral. If they want to do a career which you suspect will be low paid or if you think their chances of finding work in that field will be too difficult, instead of telling them they’re wrong to want it, you know you don’t want to be a dream killer as a parent, show them neutral sources of information on income levels and labour market statistics. Three websites with great labour market information relevant to NZ are: https://skillshortages.immigration.govt.nz/assets/uploads/long-term-skill-shortage-list.pdf

https://www.careers.govt.nz/jobs-database/

https://occupationoutlook.mbie.govt.nz

4. Listen quietly Listen quietly, patiently and uncritically.

Just listen with your full self. Restrain yourself from offering opinions / advice / solutions. Remember that your needs and your unfulfilled dreams are perhaps very different to your child’s needs and dreams. As you listen, encourage them to tell you: What do they think are their strengths? What things do they find challenging? Who would they most like to be like? Do they like themselves?

5. Believe in ‘possible selves’

If you believe in their possible selves, they will begin to believe in all of the different possible versions of themselves. We get all this pressure to be our ‘best selves’ to live our ‘best lives’ to ‘never settle’. Remember that neither you nor your children are static – you can play out different versions of yourself throughout your life. There is no single best version of you – there’s many – and you can find equal amounts of happiness and satisfaction within any of those versions.

6. Critically examine your definition of success

A recent article by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in The New York Times Magazine talked about a class reunion of Harvard Business School MBA graduates. The writer, a Harvard MBA graduate himself, describes how the majority of his former classmates had developed a ‘lingering sense of professional disappointment’ and a sense of their work being meaningless, despite having high status, six figure salary jobs. He started doing more research into professionals doing law and medicine and found that their job satisfaction levels were also dropping. Research shows that once you can provide financially for yourself and your family, additional salary and benefits don’t reliably contribute to worker satisfaction. Much more important are things like whether a job allows you to be in control of your own time, whether you work alongside others whom you respect and whether you feel your job is meaningful

7. Encourage curiosity by being curious about people, issues, events

Encourage them to talk to people, to try new things out. Lead by example. Encourage them to do some voluntary work. Encourage them to get a part time job. Working part time will grow their employability and working in customer service for a while will definitely make them curious about other career options. If they do go to university, encourage them to take advantage of the career centre there – they are staffed by great people and they organise a range of fantastic events. If you’re talking to people, if you’re trying new things out, if you are constantly learning you will be developing your career skills and if you are doing all of those things – that is going to be a life well-lived. For sure.

8. Take action

Action is the antidote to not knowing what you want to do with your life. Very few people have this searing moment of clarity where they just instantly know what they’re supposed to do with their lives; instead people discover what they like and what they are interested in by trying lots of different things.

9. Value emotional intelligence

Remember that you cannot choose well if you only base your decision on rational thought. Like it or not, we are emotional. Human beings base their decision making on emotion. By all means, get the facts, know the numbers, know the labour market, know the salary expectations, but don’t discount how you feel about it.

10. Embrace uncertainty

As a society, we seem to be nervous about uncertainty. A lot of us like to know what the plan is, and like to feel secure that we know what’s coming our way, and that is not always helpful when it comes to career development. There are two career development theories that address this - one is called the Chaos Theory of Careers and the other is called Happenstance Learning Theory. Both of these theories talk about how a really important career skill is to learn how to capitalise on chance events and how to realise that the chance of something good happening is just as likely, if not more likely, than something not so good. Have conversations with your teens about things in your life that were lucky, things in your life that seemed to be chance events that led you to a great opportunity, times in your life when you were presented with an unexpected opportunity and ran with it – help them to see that all plans need to be flexible. And to welcome unexpected positives. An inflexible plan can easily lead to disappointment whereas, a flexible plan leaves room for unexpected positives. A famous career theorist once said: “Know what you want, but don’t be 100% sure.”