What Comes After High School Graduation?
If you have a homeschool high schooler, you may sometimes feel the pressure about what comes after high school graduation. Often, teens have been thinking about it, too. The good news is that we don’t need to be intimidated by the future. There are things you can do to help with career exploration for your homeschool teens.
One of the hats I’ve worn as a homeschooling parent is advising homeschooling upperclassmen on choices for post-graduation. There are several different kinds of teens that I’ve seen. Is one of your homeschool high schoolers like one of these?
Some teens are born knowing what they want to do when they graduate.
My daughter, for instance, always wanted to be a photographer. I was concerned that she would never be able to earn a living in that profession, but she was determined. We prayed about it and then got her all the training we could before she graduated homeschool. What came after high school for her? She studied photography in college and is now a professional photographer, earning a living, and loving it!
Some teens deal with the stress about the future by ignoring it.
*I won’t think about that now!* may feel good now…but something WILL happen after graduation, so it is good for parents and teens to introduce the discussion at least by 10th grade. Teens don’t need to have everything settled by then (or even by the time they graduate) but they will feel better if there is some sort of plan.
You know you have a teen like this when they seem to only want to game or watch Netflix all day. They just can’t face the future. One of the young men I worked with some years ago was consumed with gaming. When I asked him about what he was good at (besides gaming) he became upset and said, “nothing!”. That was sad. I encouraged him and his mother to work out a schedule of:
- field trips
- service projects
- exercise and nutrition
These activities rebooted the way he was thinking about himself, simply by giving him a new kind of stimulation. As he got busy with the exercise part of the program, he noticed that he enjoyed thinking while he worked out. As he was thinking one day, he realized that he liked math and was good at it. He is now a NASA engineer.
Some teens have nagging doubts about their abilities.
They feel like they generally aren’t *good enough* (whatever that means to them). If they aren’t good enough, how could they ever succeed in a career? This is a good time to have an exploration of the specific abilities they do have.
I had a couple of teens who started out high school feeling self-doubt. One of the best things we did for them was to provide lots of Career Exploration experience. We started out by exploring their strengths and weaknesses.
We explored their strengths through:
- Personality tests (you can get some links to freebie personality tests at Vicki Tillman Coaching https://vickitillmancoaching.com/product/personal-discovery-links/
- Interviewing several adults in their lives about what that person sees in them. Some good people to do this are youth group leaders, co-op teachers, coaches, pastors, grandparents (even parents, although teens often discount what parents say about their strengths).
On the flip side, spend a few minutes facing the weaknesses.
One homeschool high schooler I advised was determined to become a surgeon. She respected people in that profession because a close family member was saved by the work of a talented surgeon. The teen wanted to be like that surgeon. Her weaknesses, unfortunately, were in sciences and math. She hated those courses! So becoming a surgeon was going to be a trying experience for her. Once she faced that fact, she was able to concentrate on her strengths. What she loved was organizing people and resources. She is now grown and working in an office, a job that she loves.
Some teens don’t know what is important to them.
They hear one set of adults telling them that they just need a job that earns enough money. Then they hear another set of adults telling them that they need to follow their interests. One of the Career Exploration gifts you can give your homeschool high schoolers is the gift of understanding their own values. In Career Exploration, “values” refers to defining what’s truly important to the teen. Here are some values questions you can ask your teen. How important to me is:
- having money for big vacations?
- having time for dinner together as a family?
- climbing the ladder of success?
- having a big house?
- time for community and church involvement?
- a college education? (and how much of a college education is important to me?)
- having a simple, structured work environment?
- working with my hands?
- job security?
- having a simple life with simple funding of expenses?
- contributing to a field of expertise?
- is *changing the world*?
One homeschool high schooler I worked with wanted to be a large-animal veterinarian. She loved horses and wanted to help them. However, her top value included having time with family, especially eating dinner together. After a couple of weeks of shadowing a large-animal vet, she discovered that their dinner and family time is often interrupted by emergencies. She prayed about her plans and chose education as her college major.
There’s no one right decision for what comes after high school graduation. Career exploration and talking about it with mentors will help teens to clarify, then follow, their goals.
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