CHAPTER 1
Imagine driving through your hometown after you’ve been away for years. You’re going to a favorite spot, and you remember the route so well that you don’t bother pulling up directions.
But when you get to the corner where you always turned, the road is closed. There’s an overpass you’ve never seen, and the building you used as a landmark is gone. You know where you want to go, but the directions you remember won’t get you there anymore.
Many parents I work with are in a similar position. When their child asks about college or careers, they pass along the directions they remember from their own experience. That’s understandable, but some of the roads have changed, and the landmarks they relied on may be gone.
If you think back to the advice you heard growing up, it probably went something like this: work hard, get good grades, go to college, study something you enjoy, get a degree, and get a good job.
Our parents, teachers, and counselors gave us that advice, and I shared it with students, too. If it worked for us, why wouldn’t we want the same for our kids?
What I didn’t understand then was how much we were leaving to chance. We assumed that once students got to college, they’d find their way. But a student can write a great application essay without knowing what they want to study, or earn a scholarship without understanding their strengths.
They can even finish a degree and still have no idea how to turn what they’ve learned into the work they want to do. Getting into college, or even earning a degree, doesn’t answer the bigger questions of what work fits them and how to prepare for it.
Living with those unanswered questions can take an emotional toll. In a national survey by Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, half of young adults ages 18 to 25 said that not knowing what to do with their lives was hurting their mental health.
Nearly three in five said they lacked meaning or purpose. These findings reflect what I’ve seen in my own work: students can earn strong grades and build impressive résumés without knowing what they want to do after graduation.
When I sit down with students who feel lost, I hear things like:
“I barely know what having a real job looks like, so it’s hard to imagine spending my life in a career when I don’t even know what that life is like.”
“I’m worried that I’ll make the wrong decision about my future and end up going down the wrong path.”
“It’s hard for me to make a confident decision regarding my future because I’m scared that if I find something I really like, I won’t be good enough to succeed at it.”
Many of these students are doing well in school, but they still feel unsure about what work they want to pursue or whether they can succeed at it.
I call the distance between earning a degree and being ready for what comes next the Career Preparedness Gap, and it helps explain why students can do everything we ask of them and still reach graduation wondering where to go.
The Career Preparedness Gap has been around for a long time, but it’s harder to close today than when most of us were in school. When it comes to your student’s plans, three changes matter most: what a degree can do for them, what employers expect, and how much it costs to find their way.