Not sure how to approach career exploration in the high school years of homeschooling? This career motivation assessment can point your teen in the right direction!
I received free access to TruSpark for review purposes and have been compensated for my time. I was not required to write a positive review and, as always, all opinions are my own. See my disclosure to learn more.
Explore Careers on Khan Academy for Free!
TruSpark, the product highlighted in this article, is no longer offered. Though it’s not similar to TruSpark’s approach, we recommend Khan Academy’s *FREE* Careers Unit as a way for your homeschooled teen to explore career options.
Career exploration can be an exciting process for teens and tweens. With a world of possibilities in front of them, it’s a chance to dream big, dig into their talents, and begin planning for life after high school.
But how do you help a teen who doesn’t feel strongly about a career field? How do you give career advice for a profession that’s not your forte? What’s more, how do you help your student determine how to incorporate his gifts, interests, and personality into his educational and career goals?
The good news is that we have help with all this career counseling! TruSpark provides assessment tools that help students discover what motivates them, understand how those motivations factor into specific job roles, and find career fields that match their core motivations and goals.
Why You Should Include Career Exploration in Your Homeschool Plans
Before I jump into what we’ve learned about TruSpark, let’s look at why core motivations and career exploration deserve a spot in your homeschool lineup.
1. It prevents wasted time and money after high school.
I know my share of folks who changed majors in college multiple times or dropped out altogether. They all started with intentions of pursuing a specific career field, but every month of higher education pushed them further away from that career rather than toward it.
Understanding core motivations and which careers will satisfy those motivations prevents a lot of these issues. Think about it, you don’t need to change majors over and over again if you enter college with the right career path — one that leads to fulfillment — in mind.
The same is true when it comes to the workforce. Career exploration centered around motivations makes it possible to pursue fulfillment through meaningful work when students enter the workforce instead assuming they’ll find it along the way.
2. Career exploration yields meaningful career choices.
Speaking of meaningful work, understanding core motivations also helps to reject that grass is greener on the other side mindset that surfaces when people are unsatisfied with their jobs. Understanding what truly motivates us helps us all seek meaningful work rather than hopping from job to job just hoping the next thing will somehow be “the one.”
As an elder millennial parent, I’m a believer in purpose. TruSpark wasn’t around when I was a teenager, but I vividly remember reading Max Lucado’s Cure for the Common Life* during lunch breaks when I worked in hospital development. (*Referral link)
That book impacted me profoundly and, in a lot of ways, it’s part of the reason I’ve been homeschooling all these years. It encouraged me to identify recurring themes in my life, to consider my gifts, interests, and motivations, and understand the difference between having a job and having meaningful work to do.
That was a huge shift in my life, but that shift happened years after my first round of college, years after I entered the workforce and transferred from department to department looking for the right fit, and after I became a parent. I’m grateful for that shift in thinking, but I can’t help wondering if it would have even been necessary if I had started my life after high school with a solid understanding of what motivates me.
3. It provides guidance for our homeschool decisions.
Before any of this comes into play, exploring possible career paths helps us teach and guide our teens and tweens as they wrap up the final years of homeschooling. In other words, career exploration helps us help them.
Granted, we need to approach the high school years of homeschooling with a checklist mentality, at least to some degree. For example, we rely on homeschool graduation requirements for our individual states (or districts). Many of us also turn to prospective colleges and shape our homeschool transcripts around their admissions requirements. Those homeschool planning approaches are both helpful and even necessary for some students.
Incorporating career exploration into our homeschool plans takes all of this to the next level by going beyond graduation requirements to provide direction.
When our students have direction based on what motivates them, they can find clear paths to achieving their post-homeschool goals and plan realistic courses of action to make it all happen. All of this starts with us using career exploration as a tool for our homeschool planning.
Career Exploration for Teens and Tweens
So, we can all see understanding core motivations is helpful, but how do we identify them? Your first thought might be to have your teen take the Myers Briggs test or dig into other personality frameworks like StrengthsFinder, DISC profiles, or the Enneagram.
Here’s the thing, all of those personality typing systems can be super helpful for a lot of areas in life. They certainly help me understand my stressors, strengths, and even some of my motivations, yet none of them focus on the motivations themselves and how they translate to certain career choices. And that’s where TruSpark can help.
What to Know About Career Exploration Through TruSpark
TruSpark consists of two components: the assessment and the curriculum. While you can purchase the components separately, using the assessment and the curriculum together provides the completeTruSpark experience.
TruSpark’s curriculum begins by introducing the program, providing options to work through it as a student or as a teacher, and links for downloadable lesson worksheets.
After that, students work through the curriculum in three levels that cover core motivations, career exploration, and living out your purpose. The entire curriculum can be completed in an afternoon or broken up over the course of a couple of days if desired.
The core motivations assessment appears in Lesson 2 of the curriculum, which is why the assessment and the curriculum truly work best when combined.
As for the assessment itself, instead of taking a standard personality test to discover core motivations, students follow a short writing prompt and work through the TruSpark assessment accordingly. After the writing prompt, TruSpark uses the submission to help students work through possible core motivations and understand which motivations apply to their submitted story.
From there, students discover three core motivations, key characteristics for each motivation, and related careers for each one. Students are also directed to the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET for further career exploration.
This career matching, along with the curriculum, provides an insightful exploration process that gives students a broad range of career possibilities based on motivations, interests, and anticipated education levels.
Our Experience with TruSpark
Now that you know more about how TruSpark works, here’s what we particularly appreciated about our experience with the TruSpark assessment and curriculum.
1. truspark affirms.
Some students may go into career exploration not knowing what they would like to do with their lives, but that wasn’t the case for my teen. In fact, he recently made changes to his college plans because he wants to go in a new direction with his career.
All that to say, his time working through the TruSpark assessment and curriculum affirmed this change in his college plans. His results helped him understand why this change would be a better fit in the long term and would provide a more sustainable career based on what motivates him.
2. TruSpark Inspires.
Since TruSpark showcases the motivations first, I found it interesting to see how the motivations themselves fit into many different careers. That provides an opportunity to think outside the box and explore careers that haven’t always been on my teen’s radar.
That process also inspired him to consider how his core motivations could fit into work and volunteer options he may pursue as a student rather than using what he learned to guide his college and career goals exclusively.
3. truspark equips.
From a homeschooling parent perspective, I appreciate how TruSpark’s curriculum provides the language for career exploration. That’s super helpful because homeschooling parents wear lots of hats: teacher, administrator, principal, coach, and guidance counselor.
We don’t have many tools available to help with that guidance counselor role. That’s why TruSpark shines when it comes to equipping parents to lead their students through the career exploration process!
Additionally, since the curriculum explores core motivations first, it helped me communicate the clear connections between specific motivations and the career options that best utilize those motivations.
Get Connected with TruSpark
Ready to get connected with TruSpark and their career exploration curriculum? Head over to the website to learn more about core motivations and register your student.
In closing, I’m happy to recommend TruSpark for any family with teens and tweens. Through their assessments and exploration of core motivations, they provide valuable career exploration tools that help students understand how they’re wired, recognize what makes them come alive, and find career paths that will bring fulfillment and meaning to their lives.
