Job Readiness and Your Teen
While you might not have been obsessing over your teen’s job readiness, it has probably been at the back of your mind for a while. Although no one is ever completely prepared to face the job market, it’s critical that your teen have appropriate employment readiness skills so that he or she feels confident to talk to a potential employer. In this article, we’ll go over a few items that can help your young adult with their job readiness. And that will help both of you have more peace of mind!
What is Job Readiness?
Job readiness not only means that your teen should be ready to talk to the person who can hire them, it also means that your adolescent can keep that job once hired. Your young adult needs to have the job skills that the person who is hiring needs. There should be a match between your teen’s skills and those that the company is looking for. A job readiness skills assessment can help your adolescent prepare for the process. A job readiness skills assessment usually includes the traits that your young person has, along with their score, and what the meaning of that score is. Or, a simpler form of a readiness skills assessment might simply have a list of the skills needed. These skills may be divided into soft skills versus hard skills, as in our previous article.
Employers require a wide range of skills from those seeking employment. The Human Resources person your adolescent will talk to is carefully looking at your teen’s resume as well as how your teen might fit in with the rest of their future co-workers. That’s why it’s so important that your young adult has a job readiness skills assessment before ever setting foot in their desired job location.
Job Readiness and Interactive Games
To help with employment readiness for youth, Identifor has interactive games that can help parents figure out what your teenager’s strengths are. Your young adult may not have a realistic idea of what his or her own strengths are, and that’s where the games can help. For instance, one young lady did not believe she liked computers, but the scores from Identifor’s games showed that her computer skills would be a strength. Her job readiness significantly changed as a result of the interactive games!
Your teenagers are probably already playing interactive games, so why not use those games to ready them for a possible job? Having a meaningful job will help to ensure that your young adult stays employed longer. Chances are, this holds true for anyone: having meaningful work is key to staying employed.
Hiring a new employee can cost a lot of money, often tens of thousands of dollars. And that’s when you hire the right employee the first time. Hiring the wrong employee can seriously inflate your hiring costs, afp Police Check is able to verify qualifications at universities and colleges across the world.
Job Readiness Activities for Youth
Once your teen or young adult has played some of Identifor’s games, you may begin to compile a list of their strengths. They’ll need to play enough games so that their strengths come through on Identifor’s dashboard. This may require some patience from both the teenager and the parent if the teen wants to rush ahead and find a job immediately.
You or your teen may also want to compile a list of companies nearby who are interesting, who need the skills that your teen possesses, and who may be hiring. You may also want to think about transportation. How will your young adult get to that job if it’s offered to her? How long will such a commute take? That may seem like a tall order, but it can be done a little at a time.
Role Playing
In terms of employment readiness, role playing can really help bolster a young person’s confidence. If he is prepared for the possible questions that may be asked during an interview, for example, he will probably feel much less anxiety about the interviewing process. After all, a job interview is difficult for anyone.
Some of the topics that may be covered during an interview include:
- What the company does
- Clarification of any details on a resume
- Asking if the teen has any questions
Preparing a few questions to ask the interviewer can shift the balance a bit. Your teen can really shine when she asks intelligent questions about the company and what her role and job responsibilities would be. The ultimate goal is to find a good match between the teen’s skills and the job opening.
In Summary
We hope that you and your young adult now have some ideas for job readiness. Moving from living at home and being dependent to becoming independent and more self-sufficient can seem like a big undertaking. Knowing what a child’s strengths are is a huge hurdle that will give both the parent and the young person more confidence. Ultimately, having that list of strengths will help to land that young person the right employment. We strongly believed that our strength-based approach gives young people an advantage so they can be matched with not just a mere job, but meaningful employment. We’ll be covering that topic in more depth in the future.
Since we’re on the subject of strengths, why not try out Identifor’s free games? The games are a fun and easy way to determine where a teen’s talents lie. You and your child may be surprised at what the dashboard shows you about their multiple intelligences and executive strengths. Identifor’s games can not only help with career direction, the games can pinpoint meaningful employment for your young person. And the games are available 24/7!
Further Resources: A Three-Step Process to Decreasing Prompt Dependency.