The first step is to log into the website and take the survey. It takes about fifteen minutes and each question consists of two choices. Your task is to choose the trait that best suits you. From your answers, the website generates a list of twenty career fields that might suit you.
My Big Helper was excited to read this description. It described her perfectly! It was exciting to see that the answers to a few questions could give them such an accurate description.
We were both thoroughly impressed by the detail here.
The list of potential career fields was a bit disappointing. It was incredibly general and most were jobs that require overseeing other people. Although the website correctly pegged my daughter as being social, she doesn’t want to have to be a ‘boss.’
Fortunately, the information doesn’t end there. By clicking on each of the twenty job categories, you’re taken to a page with more specific information – information about the specific jobs within each category. This still looks pretty general, but it gets even better.
My daughter’s favorite general category was ‘Farmers and Ranchers.’ From there, she can then click on the field highlighted at the top left, ‘Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources.’ On the page that opens, there are 38 jobs related to this general field. For each one, you can click on the precise job title; for example, you might click on ‘zoologists and wildlife biologists’ and then can access information about how many people are needed in that field, how quickly it’s growing, job responsibilities, a video giving a general overview of what that job is like, and a list of colleges and universities that provide education for that particular job.
This part was really neat to see. There’s a lot of diversity within each general category, and so clicking around to read and watch the videos will provide a lot of information. We were disappointed to see that one of our favorite agricultural schools, Pennsylvania State University, wasn’t listed under the general category of ‘Farmers and Ranchers,’ but we did find it under other ag-related fields. We thought that was odd as a very small community college did show up on that list, so I’m not sure how those college lists are created. Perhaps consider them as a great starting point for your own college research. Later, as I clicked around, I found 98 schools listed in the ‘zoologists and wildlife biologists’ category, so you will find many institutions to consider.
All told, there is a wealth of valuable information here, but it won’t pop up as quickly as it might seem. While the initial survey will provide a ranked list of job categories, this became most useful to us when we spent time clicking around within those categories and learning more about what kind of jobs are really out there. I think this is the real benefit to this program: that you’ll be directed to jobs in a field that you might not consider on your own, but that require the specific skill set that you have. From there, it’s easy to find related educational requirements and more.
My Big Helper felt the same way. She was super impressed at how well the website described her but disappointed with the generality of the ranked list. Clicking through to the specific jobs, though, gave her much to think about. She’s more interested in just clicking around the website and reading the information on her own than in following the ranked list, actually. She’d rather go straight to the jobs that she’s interested in than wade through lots of others she knows she doesn’t want to do, and I think that’s okay. She’s in eighth grade, so there’s still lots of time to make decisions – but this is a good time to be considering seriously what she’s good at and what she likes. Even as she looks for the jobs she’s interested in, she’ll be seeing the others on the same pages, and so she’s still gaining valuable job information.
CashCrunch Careers contains great information. I love that you can take the survey once and then always have access to the page with all of it’s links and categories. If you’re trying to choose a future career or are considering a change, CashCrunch Careers is definitely something to consider.
