Explore Careers with Your Teen

A family's help with exploring careers and jobs can make a big difference to teens. Learn more about exploring the world of work, taking assessments, and planning for a successful career.

Career Planning
You can help your child plan for his or her future. Research shows that parents have more influence than anyone else on their child's career choices.

Career Planning and Perspective
Before you help your teen to explore careers, you can learn more about career planning, today's job market and ways to talk to your teen about his career plans.

Career Clusters
Where do you start when choosing a career? With the number of choices out there, it helps to look at a lot of careers at once, using career clusters or groups of occupations with common features.

Skills and Interest Assessments
Your teen might have an idea of what career he or she wants, but does he know why he's made those decisions? Assessments are tools that help people discover what they have inside. There are different assessments that measure a person's interests, skills, values and other traits.

Skills
Knowing which skills employers want and why they are needed on the job will help your teen to make informed decisions when choosing college and job training options.

Goal Setting and Encouraging Development
Do you know what to do if your child is not interest in making future plans? Get tips on helping your teen to develop education and career goals and developing a positive outlook.

Career and Labor Market Information
It's worth spending a little time to get to know labor market information -- data about occupations, industries, skills, salaries, job openings, and more. Updated, local labor market information is a critical part of the puzzle when planning for a career.

Growing Careers in Minnesota
The job market is constantly changing. Find out which occupations, skills and industries have the most job openings, the highest pay and are most needed by employers.

Emerging Careers
You might have heard a lot about green careers, renewable energy, health care jobs or other career options in the news. But what does your teen really need to know about these paths when considering his options?

Unique Career Paths
Before your teen chooses a career path, make sure he or she has considered all the options available. Nontraditional careers, military options and self-employment are some of the career options that are often overlooked.