(Workshop) Career Exploration Learning Styles and Career Options

OBJECTIVE
By the end of class today in Career Exploration, you should be able to:

1. Determine which of the four learning styles apply most to you
2. Have a sense of how your preferred learning style can help indicate your career preferences or your suitability for certain careers

THE WORKSHOP
When you begin career exploration today, listen to the descriptions of today's four focus characters (Melissa, Umberto, Irene, and Sebastian). Once you have listened to the characters' introductions, decide which character sounds most like you and which character sounds least like you.

After you have decided on your characters, familiarize yourself with who you chose.

What kind of activities would they like to do? What kinds of personality traits do you think they would have? Discuss your characters for a minute with someone else, then, when you think you have gotten a good handle on them, go through the career paths that we finished last month in workshop--but as your characters would.

(Career Path Worksheet for Today's Activity)

In this warmup, answer each of the questions on the Career Path as the characters you picked as you make your way to their "suggested careers." Jot down the information on the worksheet, which you may download above as a jpeg file.

When you gone through the career paths and have your six or seven suggested careers for each character, answer the following questions.

QUESTIONS (PART 1)

1. Which career(s) can you see your characters doing most easily? Why?
2. Which career(s) would they have the most difficulty doing? Why?
3. In general how well do you think your characters were matched? Do you think they could have been matched better using a different considerations/questions? If so, how could you match your characters to more appropriate careers?

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DEVELOPMENT

Now that you have a sense of your characters, now is the time to reveal who--or should I say what they represent.

Everyone has his or her own preferred learning styles. A preferred learning style refers to the type of activities that a certain person can learn most easily from.

Each of the characters represents a person with one of four pronounced learning styles. Melissa's learning style is known as the Mastery style. Umberto's is the Understanding style, Sebastian's is the Self-Expressive style, and Irene's is the Interpersonal style. These titles are just names; and while no learning style is more superior than another, we use elements of all learning styles for different tasks in our daily lives. We are capable of learning in all the learning styles, some, however are much more suited to us than others.

Typically, there is usually one or two of the four learning styles that dominates the way we like to learn best, and the reason that we bring this subject up today in Career Exploration is because we can use an understanding of the way we like to learn in choosing a career that we'd love to do. For example, a person who has a strong Interpersonal learning style preference should perhaps reconsider doing work with little human contact. And a person who has a dominent preference for the Mastery style may not be the best person for a counseling position.

As you do the remainder of the activity today, ask yourself the question: How does the career I plan on making for myself meet my learning-style needs?

QUESTIONS (PART 2)

1. What learning style do you think is your dominant style? (Feel free to change your answer from before.)
2. Why do you think this is your dominant learning style?
3. Are there any styles that you feel rarely speaks to your preferred style of learning? Which ones?

ACTIVITY
Once you think you have your dominant learning styles figured out, let's put your guesses to the test.

Go into the Shared folder in the \server1\FWork\Students network folder. Click on the "Learning Styles Profiler.xls" file and follow the directions. When you have finished inputting your values in the table, you should print out a copy of your learning styles profile summary by clicking on the "My Profiles" tab and going to FILE > PRINT.

QUESTIONS (PART 3)

1. How on-target was your guess? (Did the learning styles you thought would be your dominant styles end up being your dominant styles?)
2. Taking into consideration the work you did with your characters, what careers or career fields do you think you are best suited for?
   
   IF TIME PERMITS
3. Go online to the College Toolkit Website and logon as MelissaMelissa, SebstianSebast, UmbertoUmberto, or IreneIrene. (The password is the same as the default Blogger password.) Then scroll down and click on the link for "Career Interest Profiler." Were your answers correct for question 2? Were there any jobs/careers listed here that surprised you? Which ones?
4. What is the general educational/training requirements for the careers that suit your dominant learning style? (Do most of the suggested careers require much training or experience? HINT: What "Job Zones" are most of your suggested careers in?