Today’s Career Market and Informing Your Students About All of Their Options

As a Counselor you must know today’s reality of the career market to advise your students.

In today’s high-tech career market, bachelor’s and master’s degrees are giving way to one-year certificates and two-year associate’s degrees for many students. This is a growing trend for careers in machine and electronics technology, AI, medical diagnostic imaging, and factory robotics.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is now strong in middle and high schools. Dual enrollment programs with community colleges are flourishing across America.

School counselors should put less focus on elite four-year universities, and steer more
students to our innovative community colleges and state technical schools. These schools are real-world, high-level, affordable, flexible, and have very strong partnerships with local high-tech and manufacturing industry.

Three groups that counselors should have dialog with are:

1: SkillsUSA: https://www.skillsusa.org/

2: Association for Career and Technical Education: https://www.acteonline.org/

3: Technology Student Association: https://tsaweb.org/

Many students will of course pursue a traditional college path, but there are many other options with today’s career market and hopefully you discuss those with students so they can make an informed decision about all their options.