Connect with the Best People, Assemble Your Personal Network, and Navigate Successfully to Your Dream Career

As an additional (and free) resource for our readers, we’ve created a Navigation Team Action Guide. This guide works with the book Test Drive Your Future to help a high school or college student identify a group of people who will support their dream career.

Our experience has found that it is invaluable to have a “navigation team” on your career journey—a few key people to turn to for support, practical advice, honest feedback, and sometimes even a little cheerleading along the way. Your navigation team should be made up of people with a variety of qualities: people you admire, people whose advice you trust, people who will listen to your ideas, people who are successful, and people who will help you whenever you are stuck or in an emergency.

Your team might be made up of parents, friends, teachers/professors, mentors, counselors, coaches, or professionals in your future career field. Sometimes these people simply emerge at the right time, and sometimes you need to seek them out to help ensure your success in accomplishing your dreams.

Connect with the Best People, Assemble Your Personal Network, and Navigate Successfully to Your Dream Career!

You can download it for free here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/68564657/Navigation-Team-Action-Guide

A Future Career in Writing and Communications

This month as the GPS Gal on Girlzone.com I interviewed Jessica, who is anticipating a career in communications, and is currently preparing to take a gap year abroad. Here’s what she says about future path: “I didn’t really choose my subject; it chose me..” If you might be considering community college in the future and would like some solid advice about why you should choose this option, or would just like to learn about Jessica’s upcoming gap year, read on…

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Choosing Between a Zoologist and a Chef

This month on Girlzone.com, I had the following question from one of the students:

“I would like to be a zoologist or a chef. I love animals and cooking, which one?”

I love questions like this because it’s fun to explore different types of careers, especially ones that you don’t hear about everyday, like a zoologist! What a very broad spectrum of interests you have! Let’s explore them in three different ways:

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Internships in Student Conservation

This week we talked with a high school graduate named Brieland Jones who shared with us the website where he found his current internship at Yellowstone National Park. Check out the Student Conservation Association’s website to find similar types of internships at: www.thesca.org

You can also check out the Youtube video below about the SCA:

E-mailing like a professional

This week we stumbled upon the top 10 Dos and Don’ts of e-mailing like a professional. These tips came from Lindsey Pollak’s book, Getting from College to Career, an excellent resource for anyone looking to find their first job, second job, or any job really.

These tips apply to e-mailing anyone who you consider a professional contact- potential employers, past employers who could write a reference letter for you, people you’d like to conduct an informational interview with, etc. So here they are, in no apparent order:

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