At some point when you were little, you were asked, ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up,’ and being a young and oblivious child your unserious answer was a job your favorite childhood toy, your favorite TV influencer or your parent’s did. Then when you grow up, so many things change and now you are a Junior or Senior in high school who is starting to look into a future career that you will love and can have forever. But do you ever feel overwhelmed, looking at career paths because there are so many opportunities that you don’t know what to choose? Well, here are some tips on how to narrow your choices down. 

There are career quizzes that students can take, like 16personalities.com or careerfitter.com, where they will ask you certain personality and life decision questions to try and understand what type of person you are, then, with your results, will recommend adjacent career paths to the students according to their choices in the survey.  Kellen Price, a school counselor at Grayslake Central High School, said “[He] thinks the [career quiz] results are as accurate as the student, how much they’re putting into the test. If the student is kind of flying through the test because they just wanna get it done, kinda like any test in class, [they’re] not gonna do as well. So I think if a student approaches [the career quiz] with… “I’m really curious”, then they may get more accurate results”. 

There is also SchoolLinks! SchoolLinks is a platform where high school students can look for future careers, prepare their work & school resume, and if students choose to attend college, they can apply for college through SchoolLinks. SchoolLinks has many career tests and will lead students to success, so making sure every student makes a SchoolLink account is important. 

Choosing a career path can feel like an overwhelming task, especially with thousands of opportunities. Though taking career quizzes, talking to friends and family about career paths, and using programs like SchoolLinks can help students explore careers and will lead you in the right direction to success.