The New Choices Planner

By Keira McPhee

It’s a delicate balance trying to inspire high school students to think about their future careers and lives while also encouraging them to be realistic and practical about what’s possible. This is the goal of Bridges’ successful new website Choices Planner [www.bridges.com/us/prodnserv/educareerplan_hs.html].

Bridges [www.bridges.com], located in Kelowna BC, is a developer of software-based and online education planning, career exploration, and high school/college test preparation resources. They focus primarily on the middle and high school market in North America. I’ve been a fan of Bridges’ Choices Explorer for years, a career exploration website comprised of lively magazine-style articles and profiles. The look is always fun-in this new site, the funky palate of colours is accompanied by Japanese anime style illustrations of young sophisticates looking oh-so-cool at work.

The site is organized into three sections, Work, Learn and Portfolio, which provide students with the information, resources and tools to explore careers, identify relevant educational pathways and create personalized action plans.¹

Work

The backbone of this section are 995 NOC (National Occupational Classification) profiles organized into sixteen Career Zones. One-minute videos provide a quick overview of each career but feel a little stiff. Though comprehensive, these profiles are no match for those in Career Explorer. Luckily, and not surprisingly, the two products are fully compatible.

The Career Finder allows students to search for careers by personal and educational criteria, earnings, future outlook, and various career facts. I had a lot of fun exploring “Careers by Gender” and “Work Hours and Travel”. Teachers will use this feature to provoke lively discussions on values.

Compare Careers allows users to select any two careers and view the profiles side by side. I selected Civil Engineer and Urban and Regional Planner and the juxtaposition of these two career profiles, not only clarified their specific functions and duties, but also made the differences obvious. This is a simple but powerful functionality.

The self-assessment tools are fairly standard inventories that if completed, promise to generate meaningful career options. There are three skills assessments, the Basic Skills Survey, the Workplace Skills Survey and the Transferable Skills Survey. These are fairly lengthy assessments and students will probably need more motivation to complete them than the site currently provides.

Although the Transferable Skills Survey encourages students to “Check the skills that you know you can do today — and the ones you’re planning to develop in the future” most of the skills aren’t very relevant to a high school audience. “Analyzing or testing engineering plans” and “Reviewing and evaluating personnel records” are typical.

The Interest Profiler is comprised of 180 questions. I spent a lot of time clicking through random activities like “Build kitchen cabinets” but perhaps my quibble is more with John Holland than this site. Smaller groupings of questions interspersed with periodic feedback, like “So far your interests suggest you are a real people person, with organizational flair. Keep going to find out what careers this could lead to” would help.

The Values Sorter breaks the list mold with a version of a values card sort but in general the assessments could benefit from some more creative interaction design.

Getting Ready to Work includes a Resume Builder, a Cover Letter, Builder, a Thank-You Letter Builder and Interview Practice. They all emphasize basic formatting and structure with occasional tips and examples. Educators will still need to guide students on how to target messages to employers and how to identify and present relevant accomplishments.

Learn

In this section students explore programs, majors and schools with the same ease they did for careers in the Work section. The Canadian version of this tool will be released later this summer and what a benefit it will be for students.

The Program and Major Finder presents all the options available for a particular program of study. Students can also search by the School Finder to research schools according to admissions standards, deadlines, tuition, programs offered, sports, campus life and available career services and co-op programs. The Compare Schools is a very practical decision-making tool allowing students to easily compare schools on these criteria.

For younger students pondering college or university there is a grade-by-grade College Planning Guide. They can also see what they need to take to prepare for a specific career with the High School Planning Guide.

Portfolio

The Portfolio offers the opportunity for deeper interaction and reflection, prerequisites for intelligent action. It was extremely satisfying to click and see a record of all the careers, programs and schools I’d researched as well as my inventory results. It felt like I had a very observant, active guide beside me.

What makes a portfolio more than just a cache of work is the reflection and dialogue they spark. To get the most out of it, students will need to be prompted to reflect in their journals and hear meaningful feedback from their teachers and their peers.

The Portfolio is also where students can tinker with the career plans they’ve built along the way. The Career Plan Builder is the heart and soul of the site- where the planning gets personal and students are encouraged to move their dreams into action.

I built a few plans to compare different paths. I selected a career, which automatically suggested the high school courses I needed to take, as well as college and university programs for the future. I also speculated on where I might want to live, whether I’d be single or married, have kids or not, and how I’d be involved in my community.

Making your Plan Happen outlines specific action steps that actually feel doable. The spur to action is made more direct by good design and programming. When I clicked on “Contact a related association” I was automatically linked to professional associations relevant to Urban Planner, the career I was researching.

Summary

Choices Builder is full of the information students need to make good plans and is for the most part presented in ways that promote engagement. If students are encouraged to take the opportunities to reflect and interact as they go, they’ll be well on their way to building satisfying careers.

Keira McPhee is the Educational Programmer for UBC Career Services where she leads development of online career self-managment resources and tools. She began her career facilitating employment programs for women, worked as a labour market resource advisor and went on to establish the first Career Services for the Tec de Monterrey in Mexico.

¹The fourth section entitled Professional Tools is designed for educators and provides the functionality needed to manage student portfolios, track statistics, and plan lessons. This section is not included in this review.