JobJoy for Young Adults: Discovering the Power of Your Personal Story

By George Dutch

The purpose of the eBook is to help parents as career coaches of their young adults. Dutch, a certified career professional for almost 20 years, has helped hundreds of parents and young adults make excellent school and career choices.
"This book helps parents get their young adults to talk about themselves," says Dutch. "About times in their lives when they were doing what they enjoy most and do best; what they enjoy and have fun doing; simple thing--what excites them or turns them on at school and outside of school.
"This book will help parents analyze that material, so they can clearly understand the definitions of what their son or daughter does naturally and effortlessly--and how those key elements of their right work connect to specific jobs in specific organizations."
There are significant obstacles within the school system today that handicap students and their parents from making good career choices. Dutch's 'Job Joy for Young Adults' program is designed to help parents overcome those obstacles.

Obstacle # 1: Guidance counselors are overwhelmed by sheer numbers these days.
Obstacle # 2: Teens have little understanding of how their unique combination of innate talents, learned skills, and limited job experience correlate with specific jobs in specific organizations. In short, they can’t answer two simple questions: Where and What?

Obstacle # 3: The main assessment tool of counselors is an interest inventory. Identify the interests a student has at 17 or 18 and put them on a career path for life. But our interests at 18 can be very different than our interests at 28, 38, or 48.
Obstacle # 4: Traditionally, guidance counselors will rely on tests. Tests are just technology. "Career choice is not just a science; it's an art," says George. Counselors assume that test scores reflect the motivational dynamics of the individual tested. This assumption is false.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Dutch
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781896428055

George Dutch

George has been a Career Transition Expert, Author, Speaker, & Workshop Presenter for almost 20 years. He works one-on-one with individuals to analyze their written stories then writes a personalized, customized JobJoy Report to help each client fashion a new work identity, before coaching them through a significant career transition. His unique approach, based on his book, JobJoy, was recently profiled by Katharine Hansen at A Storied Career (http://tinyurl.com/yyt5bfh). The purpose of his Career Thought Leaders blog (http://www.careerthoughtleaders.com/) is to provide colleagues with tools and techniques that will help them mine gold from their clients' life stories. In order to mine gold, you have to move a lot of ore; moving it efficiently and effectively is what this blog is about.

Book preview

Job Joy for Young Adults:

Discovering the Power of Personal Story

George Dutch

with

Maria Ford

Smashwords Edition

Copyright JobJoy(TM)

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN 978-1-896428-05-5

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction/Epilogue

Look at So-and-So

Do you like to ride in a fire truck?

Where the jobs are

All my eggs in one basket.

I was happy for a few years

If I had it all to do over again

Glossary of terms

About the authors

PREFACE

I am a Personal Story Analyst. My passion is analyzing the facts, people and events of life stories to identify the meaning and purpose of that story. My mission is to apply this passion to helping individuals find the joy of living through working with their passions.

My first book, Job Joy! Finding Your Right Work Through the Power of Your Personal Story, was written in 1995. In it, I shared with readers the Job Joy(TM) process and provided exercises for adults seeking their right work during career change. Since that time, I have had the privilege of helping more than 1500 clients through that process, toward their right work.

Many of those clients were pleased enough with the outcomes of their Job Joy(TM) experience that they sent their teenage children to see me with the desire that they would make good early decisions about educational and vocational direction. My work with youths has led to a new phase of Job Joy(TM) – called Job Joy(TM) for Young Adults – and has expanded my knowledge and understanding of how one’s personal story provides clues to one’s right work.

For teens, the Job Joy process is different than it is for mid-career adults, who have the weight of responsibility on their shoulders and their professional history at risk. For teens, the process is shorter and less painful.

•It’s shorter because teens are just beginning. They are just beginning to think about a professional life and making professional decisions. They are just beginning to know their own personal stories.

•It’s less painful because a teen has much less at risk than an adult who is mid-career and unhappy. As adults, we must struggle terribly with big changes – and a career change affects every part of life, including our relationships, finances, self confidence, health and more. But your teen is right at the cusp of starting that journey, giving you and I the chance to help set him or her on a path that both establishes their independence and honors the essence of who they are as a person.

With Job Joy(TM) for Young Adults, I am blessed to have the chance not only to empower teenagers with insight into the seeds of their personal stories, but also to guide them in a direction that is likely to eliminate the struggles and risks of career dissatisfaction later in life. With Job Joy(TM) for Young Adults, I work with my passion and fulfill my mission by giving teens and their parents greater insight into those stories and how those stories translate into the best choice of educational route and vocational pursuits.

To all my clients – and in particular to those budding teen clients – I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for sharing your stories with me. You feed my passion as a Personal Story Analyst; you awe me with your energy, your talent and your uniqueness; you have opened a new door in my understanding of the power of personal story by showing me the seeds of those stories as they unfold in your unfolding lives.

Thank you.

George Dutch

INTRODUCTION/EPILOGUE

"If I had it all to do over again, I’d do it differently."

There’s a common argument in the homes of teens who are on the cusp of adulthood, faced with choices about courses and careers that will set the direction for their lives. It goes something like this:

"You can’t make a living being a ski instructor!"

"Well, none of the ski instructors I know are starving."

"But it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle. What happens when you are too old for it, or need to make enough money to support a family?"

"Oh, what do you know?"

"I know that an education opens doors to a better life. You have great science marks – you could be an engineer!"

"I don’t want a life like yours, sitting at a desk and taking orders for 40 years."

"But what will you do?"

"I don’t know. I’ll figure it out!"

EARLY CAREER CHOICE CAN BE OVERWHELMING

Young people are inundated with choice, possibilities and pressure. As adults, we often remember youth as a time when the world was our oyster – it’s easy to forget how overwhelming a world of choice can be.

Teens today are pressured to make major decisions about their futures before they’ve had much chance to experience the world. They’re faced with a broad, sometimes daunting spectrum of choice when it comes to career planning. And, they are offered opinions and advice from all corners. Families, friends, teachers, media, guidance counselors: for better or worse, many people play a role in influencing early career choices. In a recent book called Real Teens, George Barna discovered that nine out of 10 teens think about their futures every week, but only three out of 10 feel they are well prepared. (Barna, George Real Teens, Brana Research Group, 2001)

No parent is willing to leave a child’s future up to chance, but the options for how to help may seem limited. We may lack confidence in our ability to give good guidance – especially when we look back and consider mistakes we have made ourselves. Is go to school sufficient advice? At what point do we cross the line over to being a pushy parent, trying to mold our child into a space they may not fit? How, ultimately, can we be confident that we are guiding them in the best direction?

More importantly, how can we imbue our children with the confidence that they are headed in the right direction?

JOBJOY TEEN: ROADMAP TO SUCCESSFUL EARLY CAREER CHOICE

Civilizations are built by those who find their passion and pursue it persistently.

We often say, I’d love to be 21 again and know what I know now. With Job Joy(TM) Teen services, I have the opportunity to share what I wish I’d known when I was a teenager making decisions about vocational direction that would affect my life. And I have the opportunity to give parents the tools they need to effectively, confidently guide their children toward a suitable vocational path.

What do I know now that I didn’t know then? I know that:

1. Mistakes in career choice can be expensive

2. Common career guidance techniques often fail – but there are effective alternatives

3. Four steps are critical to career planning for students – and skipping a step is dangerous

4. It is possible for a young person to make ideal career choices – given the right tools and knowledge to work with

Job Joy Teen is designed to help you help your youth (16-25 years old) gather the information he or she needs to make the best possible educational and vocational decisions – before anxiety sets in, before time is lost, before money is wasted pursuing work that just doesn’t fit.

1. Mistakes are Expensive

As adults, we know that mistakes are part of life – they teach us valuable lessons and build our store house of experience, making us more resilient and more prepared in the future. But there are some mistakes we wish we’d never made. Usually, they’re the ones that cost us significantly in terms of time, money or relationships.

Our careers make up the greater part of our lives. We spend most of our time at work – 80,000 hours over the course of a life – and we depend on work to afford the other aspects of life. Work demands time, energy and mental resources, but so often we get it wrong. When a career turns out to be unfulfilling work feels like a waste of time, it saps our energy, it can destroy our mental resources and, in turn, our health and our relationships. These are the symptoms I see every day during the course of my work at Job Joy. Getting a career wrong is costly in many ways.

And it’s just plain costly: as much as $300,000 over the course of a career for every $10,000 mistake we make, based on the simplest rule of interest – the time value of money. $10,000 misspent on the wrong education, $10,000 lost in income due to stress leave, $10,000 in unrecognized earning potential due to poor job performance . . . every time we make a $10,000 career-related mistake, we have lost up to 30 times that by retirement. It’s not just what