CAREER CRUISING

Grade Level The planning options for a high school curriculum mean the database can be useful for students as young as middle school, but adults considering career changes wouldn't find the interface too simplistic. Cost A site license for a single school or library starts at $595 for the English language-only version, with discounts for multiple sites available. Licensing includes promotional materials, a monthly newsletter, training, and ongoing support. You can toggle to a Spanish-language version when you purchase the bilingual U.S. interface for $795 a year. Overview While many students begin exploring career options by considering the occupations of friends and family, part of the role of a guidance counselor and high school teacher is to expand that spectrum of possibilities. Career Cruising is an apt name for a suite of career and educational planning tools that can help students explore and revisit a host of potential jobs, while streamlining the job search process as well as college applications. Created by Toronto-based Anaca Technologies, the database lets students dip in and out of a wide range of occupational options, saving their responses alongside supplementary materials, such as letters of recommendation and work samples, in a personalized online portfolio. The resource can be integrated into a school's existing long-term planning and guidance efforts and nicely supports research projects into potential careers. Look and Feel The entire database features intuitive navigation between screens, with digital breadcrumbs back to interest inventory results or to wider career clusters, obviating the need for much browser-based navigation. The interface allows students to bookmark careers as well as colleges of interest, and its online nature means students can return to their work wherever they have Web access. Accessible to most web-savvy students, Career Cruising handily defines terms like freelancing ("which means that they are hired by producers on a project-by-project basis"), which are sometimes difficult for students to grasp. How It Works The Career Matchmaker uses three quizzes (ranging from a minimum of 39 up to 116 questions) to determine an individual's potential job recommendations. The easy-to-use interface auto-enters your response as you tick one of five corresponding Likert-scaled options for each statement. The database clearly demonstrates how Matchmaker questions map to each corresponding profession and divides the recommendations within 16 different career clusters. For increased precision, students can also limit their matched careers in terms of the level of education they are willing to undertake. The database becomes even more valuable when incorporating the results of a second inventory, this one representing students' self-reported level of skill in a variety of general areas such as math, note taking, or paperwork. The skills option lets users gauge the careers that best reflect their comfort in terms of their existing aptitudes and talents, using a five-point scale ranging from a very good match to a poor one. A 20-question learning style inventory rounds out Career Cruising's integrated assessments. In addition to the occupational matches suggested post-assessment, students can search for a specific career outside the recommendations to see why it doesn't correspond with their responses regarding the interest or skill set inventory. Those determinations are divided into central and secondary aspects of each occupation, with a visual representation of the survey responses reflected using traffic-light indicators of red, yellow, and green. Those cues make Career Cruising particularly persuasive when considering whether the affective aspects of a position will be the right fit for a given student. Students can also browse by careers related to their favorite subject, or military or trade-based careers, narrowing by military branch or industrial sector, two areas of interest at my school. Each field suggests a very general four-year high school program of study, which reflects some local flexibility in terms of curricular requirements. For Students The occupational data puts two faces (typically both a male and a female) to each profession and goes well beyond the rather dry information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics by exploring day-to-day tasks, as well as overweening achievements and frustrations that typify the work. The earnings information is adjustable by state and shows typical salaries for entry-level, median-wage, and experienced professionals, as reported by each state with a hyperlink to the original data source. Similarly, long-term employment trend projections are described, which convey demand in a given geographic area based on population shifts, improvements in technology, or anticipated retirements. Annual job openings are broken down into replacement units and industry growth, for a sense of the overarching forces at play in a given field. Though students can use the Matchmaker without saving their assessment results, setting up an individual login allows them to save quiz responses as well as take advantage of the numerous long-term planning and communications options within the database. The numerous browsing options means that students can begin with either very general or specific career plans and link to a range of related occupations they might not have considered otherwise. The occupational database is rife with practical suggestions regarding necessary skills, with excellent advice on steps that students can take to try out related job functions For instance, for costume designer, the database recommends "Getting involved with amateur theater and drama clubs is a good way to find out more about the world of stage productions." The suggestions for college programs related to the pursuit of a given occupation aren't overly prescriptive and the value of general liberal arts studies recurs across occupations. Each job is explored in terms of core tasks, workplace settings, earnings, and education and training expectations. The two question-and-answer segments for each profession probe actual individuals employed in the field and delve into micro-level likes and dislikes that typify the work. Interviewees include individuals who've taken nontraditional paths, as well as ones who pursued related college majors and coursework. There's a "Day in the Life" time line that reveals a typical workday hour by hour. Much of the interview content is available via Windows Media or QuickTime video files as well as text transcript. The "breakdown of activities" details the physical demands of the job, work environment, and responsibilities, some of which may surprise students. The Photo File offers representations of typical occupational work in an unambiguous and easy-to-understand visual format. The Sample Career Path offers a variety of employment settings, detailing the requirements, responsibilities, and salary potential that typify each. The Job Search menu allows students to search current openings in the field from the website indeed.com, using keywords and filtering by state, city or zip code. Within the Career Cruising interface, those results can be sorted by relevance or date and filtered by location, company, title, and job type (full or part time). It's difficult to imagine using the database for employment searches; perhaps it's most useful for reinforcing the occupational trends contained elsewhere in the job profile. The section on colleges and universities allows students to filter results by state or geographic region and to compare raw data, such as enrollment and student-teacher ratios, about two schools side by side. Much of the information about the colleges and universities (for example, endowment and admission rates) is presented without much context. Again, the information about class rank and mean SAT scores does not position those within a wider context, which would enable students to understand how competitive a school might be both in terms of admission and coursework. Academic information includes graduation requirements and retention rates. Athletic information includes data on intercollegiate and intramural sports, but again without much context for comparing schools. The facilities and services option describes the number of libraries and computing access on campus, and extracurricular opportunities are listed under student life. A nice touch would be integrating interviews with students similar to those of the professionals profiled in the database's occupational side. The Student Portfolio lets you create a database of a student's hobbies and volunteerism, providing a space for organizational information, start and end dates, and a free-text description that combines with the student's personal data to create a push-button digital resume. The menu-driven list of interests will show students how their abilities and interests translate into workplace skills, though finding the place where the database has positioned them may require some trial and error. Students can also attach artifacts of their own experience as digital files. There's a journal component (which states that content will be viewable by teachers and counselors) and students can link to online content to create a digital portfolio. Users can also invite viewers to see specific aspects of their portfolio, with students able to track those views. Students can also comment on overall career clusters, a tool that would aide in advising. The School Selector menu option begins with "public or private" checkbox options and continues with "graduate or undergraduate" areas of study. I know from experience that some students don't understand those distinctions, so perhaps clarification at this stage might help students navigating the college application process on their own. The menu-driven approach for finding institutions doesn't really get at the funding opportunities that drive many college decisions and is perhaps overly reliant on a student's prediction of their major area. Career Cruising shines in making connections between coursework, work experience, and employment opportunities, as well as showcasing the number of related occupation, and stressing transferability of skills between jobs through its Related Careers area. Most worker profiles stress the necessity for practical on-the-job training as well as post-secondary coursework, and the connections between educational fields and careers are appropriately diverse. Even the splash page is laden with content about attractive but sometimes overlooked occupations. The weekly featured interview, for example, profiled a technician at a television network working within the film and television crew career category. The career paths section illustrates the shared skill set required at varying levels of responsibility, from internship to management, and stresses the importance of formal credentialing for career advancement. For Teachers and Librarians Tools within Career Cruising enable the site administrator to create and manage both student and advisor profiles, and offers the ability to view content and responses from affiliated students. There are mechanisms to develop and deliver custom course recommendations for each individual, as well as push other messages within the interface. Students can be promoted and graduated though the administrative module as they leave the school. Most screens have printer-friendly formatting options, and an integrated user guide provides information about network and browser compatibility and multimedia viewing requirements. Verdict A subscription to Career Cruising provides a suite of valuable tools for guidance counselors, librarians, and teachers in a variety of educational settings concerned with college and career readiness. More information and a 30-day free trial are available (www.careercruising.com).