College to Career: Time to plan

Dennis, a high school junior from Old Lyme, CT, came in with his parents.  His family had moved from Fairfield County to Shoreline, CT during Covid.

“These kids have no idea what they want to do when they grow up.”

I laughed.  I didn’t find that to be particularly unusual.

But where he had come from, most of his peers had developed at least thematic answers to this question.

To be clear, the neurosis of striving cultures in other geographic areas that The Learning Consultants serve – Fairfield County, Westchester County, Northern NJ, and Washington DC – is something I want to bring to our relatively easy-going world.

But things are changing… and parents who are not cultivating a college-to-career mindset for their children perhaps should consider starting the conversation.

18 years ago, The Learning Consultants built its career counseling practice.

The focus was to help those we helped through the college counseling process who were now twentysomethings attempting to figure out their career path.   Most were unhappy but perhaps not unsuccessful.  By this I mean that most had career building jobs but they had chosen a mismatched career.

Now, the calls related to career unhappiness remain the same but calls related to failing to launch have sky rocketed.  The number of students – particularly boys – who are not getting through college and/or getting through after five or six years but floundering thereafter has become common.  The core reason is often lack of career focus.  Almost everyone who is similarly situated will say: “I should have met you before.”

Now as part of our college counseling, we offer career counseling if desired.  We are not necessarily pinpointing the career path but rather starting the conversation earlier so that the student has a better sense of which college programs match their potential career track.

College is awesome so staying for 6 years would be great…. if you weren’t paying for it!

We can help avoid that fate.