Molding Child's Interest

Career advice can be an important factor in molding child's interest. Children at younger ages are very impressionable, hence giving them right career advice can play a great role in forming their preconceptions and helping them set long term goals. It can also provide children with more information about the career in which they might be interested in and can make them aware of additional career options as well. Let's see how career advice can help in molding a child's interests and future.

• Provide Information About Different Career Options
  At a younger age people rarely think about career and even when they do, it is mostly in abstract form and without much information to back their thinking up. For example a child may think that he or she would want to be a doctor or scientist or movie star when they grow up, but they'll likely have little or no idea what a career like a doctor or movie actor may involve. Career advice can help in such situations in two major ways: Firstly, it can make them aware of the difficulty and challenges involved with a particular career choice, may be becoming a doctor, and also provide some guidelines that can help them achieve success in that career. This information and guidelines can help mold a child's interest. Secondly; career advice can provide information about the professions and make them aware of additional career options that they may never have thought about. These can affect a child's interest by making them reconsider their options and especially if they decide one of the newly revealed career options are the right one for them.
• Broaden Child's Vision
  As a positive side effect, all this information provided by career advice also broadens the child's vision and makes him or her think seriously about career. This helps mold children's interest as they become more likely to be interested in topics and subjects that can be of help to them career wise as well.
• Basic Skills and Competencies
  Career advice also provides children information about basic skills and competencies that are necessary for a successful career, as well as ways to develop and improve them. This can help children by providing important guidance and direction, which over the time can be an important factor in molding the child's interest. There are five competencies and three foundation skills, collectively known as SCAN skills, Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, which all persons should have to be effective, efficient and successful in their careers. The objective of this commission was to identify the skills that all persons entering the work force should have. These five competencies are as follows:
  1. Resources
     The competency in resources implies the ability to effectively manage time, money, material and facilities as well as human resources.
  2. Interpersonal
     The interpersonal competency involves ability to work as part of a team, serve clients/customers, negotiate, provide leadership, work with people from different cultures and teach others.
  3. Information
     Information competency involves acquiring and evaluating information, organizing and maintaining information for efficient access, interpreting and communicating information from and to other persons and finally using computers to process information.
  4. System
     Competency in systems implies that the person should be able to understand systems as well as improve, design, monitor and correct the performance of the system. The word system here refers to anything that has component parts that work together to achieve certain goals.
  5. Technology
     Technological competencies involve the ability to select appropriate technology, use it in work and maintain and troubleshoot the technology.

  Besides the five competencies there are also three foundation skills involved in SCANS, which are required to become successful in career and society in general.

  1. Basic Skills
     Basic skills are just that basic and are more or less necessary. These involve reading, writing, speaking, some mathematical aptitude and listening skills.
  2. Thinking Skills
     Thinking skills are all concerned with the ability to use your own mind and involve creative thinking, problem solving, decision making, reasoning, knowing how to learn and deduction or extrapolating.
  3. Personal Quality
     Though not exactly skills as such the personal qualities are very important in an individual for him or her to be an effective and contributing member of work force and society in general. The personal qualities involve integrity, sense of individual responsibility, sociability, self esteem and self management.

Career advice can play an important role in developing these skills and competencies and in general motivating the child.

Overall we see that the career advice can play an important role in molding and shaping the child's interest by providing guidance for developing necessary skills, by providing information about career he or she may be interested in as well as making them aware of career options that they may never have considered by themselves.