Video: Helping Teenagers Think About Career Exploration

Patrick Britton, associate vice president of the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education, helps teenagers think about career exploration and how to find a career.

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This presentation was part of Your Teen Magazine‘s College Event Cleveland in January 2015. To see all the presentations from the College Event Cleveland, click here.

How To Search For A Career

Excerpt:

Good evening, my name is Patrick Britton and I work as an associate vice president of the Northeast Ohio Counsel on Higher Education. And I have for you what is an extremely exciting topic. It is career exploration. Yeah. So I’m calling it “What Is Your Thing? Turning Your Thing Into A Job.” Please don’t fall asleep on me. Hopefully the food will help you not do that. And here is the crux of my argument. This is it: find a thing. Explore your thing. Do you want to do more of that thing? Then keep doing it. Now when you’re ready for a new thing, find a new thing.

So careers are a not-easy-to-find kind of thing. In my experience, which is relatively limited, you don’t necessarily get a lot of good advice on how to search for a career. In fact as I sat down before Tara Cue’s presentation a minute ago, the person across from me said, “Oh, my daughter’s a freshman in college, and she needs to find a career. How should she do it?”

So ultimately, what I want to argue for you is that you should start by thinking about college or post-secondary, how do you find the right college? We heard a lot of tips about that. But I want to start with the argument, “Is College even worth it in the first place?” We hear that a lot these days. And you can’t read these graphs, you don’t need to read them.

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Basically what we see is true for years, year after year after year, if you get some education you will get more money. The more education you get, generally speaking, the more money you will make. These are averages. I have a master’s degree, and I don’t make very much money, because I work for a non-profit, and I’m an associate vice president, which actually is a pretty low man on the totem pole. So it’s not true for every person you know, but on average it is true.

(For the rest of this presentation, please watch our attached video)