How is a comprehensive guidance course different than a career exploration course?
While career exploration is an important subset of a comprehensive guidance course (CGC), a CGC is so much more. In addition to career exploration, a CGC must help students

• Learn to project into the future and understand the consequences of today's choices and actions
• Understand how to match academic and educational effort to lifestyle expectations
• Become identity-achieved through contemplation and self-discovery
• Learn and practice the communication, interpersonal, and self-management skills necessary to succeed in today's educational and workforce settings
• Identify and plan for the challenges and stumbling blocks that are inevitable in today's fast-paced, competitive world
• Analyze quantitatively what economic self-sufficiency equals for them
• Become proactive, rather than reactive, in managing change in their lives

Besides traditional career exploration topics, a CGC helps young people understand the challenges and the benefits of a consciously-planned career path. Armed with this information, they are far more likely to persevere when they hit life's "speed bumps.

Most of our students are going to college. Why would they need a course like this?
50% of students drop out of college or do not graduate within six years. That statistic alone should convince you of the need for ALL students to receive a CGC. In addition, studies of college students show that students who are career-focused and career-committed are far more likely to graduate from college and transition into the workforce at the level for which their college education prepared them. Today, 20% of 26-year-olds live at home or are not economically independent of their parents. Addressing the issue as it relates to economic self-sufficiency requires students to understand the necessity for a career focus.

How do we convince parents of the need for this type of course for their teenagers when faced with the all-too-common refrain, "My child doesn't need this. They're going to college!"
In the United States, young adults who require economic support from their parents (past their schooling years) are known as Twixters (see Time magazine, January 25, 2005). In Great Britain, these young adults are known as KIPPERS, which is an acronym for: Kids In Parents Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings Next time you are with a group of parents who question the importance of this type of class, ask how many of them know families whose adult children returned home after graduating from college because they couldn't find a job that would support them. Watch the hands go up and the heads nod!

We'd like parents more involved with their students' planning. What can we do?
The personal information students organize and store at My10yearPlan.com should be shared with parents. As students work on updating their plans, parents can provide valuable input and support.
To take parental involvement one step further, consider a combined parent/adolescent activity that develops the career decision making skills of both the adults and teens. Studies show that parents are the most important supporters of a student's future plans. And, because so many adults are going through their own mid-life re-evaluation when they have adolescent children, you'll be doing them both a service.

Is it really possible to get the average 14-year-old to write a comprehensive 10-year plan for their future?
Absolutely! When taught in sequence, Career Choices leads students through a step-by-step process (up to 100 active-learning exercises) that enables them to articulate who they are and what they want their lives to look like after high school. Each of the activities builds on the ones before. When documented in the Workbook and Portfolio, students can easily compile their plan and store it online to reassess, review, modify, or update later.

Why 10 years? Isn't four or five years enough?
It's important that young people be able to envision -- and then plan for -- a productive future as a self-sufficient adult. A four-year plan gets the typical student through high school graduation. A five-year plan may get them into college but, as we all know, the college dropout rate is 50%. Therefore, a 10-year plan is needed to take them through high school, post-secondary education/training, and into the workforce understanding what it takes to become financially responsible for themselves and their future families.