About this Site

Our mission is to provide useful and up-to-date information on career planning, post-secondary education and training and going to work for British Columbia parents and students.

There are numerous web sites available for career planning and for the various aspects of going to post-secondary education or work. Most of these sites are aimed at a general population, although they may have specific sections devoted to parents or youth. We have looked for the most relevant, interesting and informative parts of these websites in building this site.

The Career Planning for Students and Parents site has a combination of original material and external web sites. Each of the external web sites chosen has been reviewed and the web site's content is summarized in a short paragraph. External web sites have been chosen based on the quality of their information, how effectively they are organized and how up-to-date the information is. As much as possible we have attempted to bypass introductory pages on external sites and take you directly to the information you are interested in. If you wish to explore external sites in more detail, you can hit their 'search', 'site map' or 'home' buttons.

One of the goals of this site is to provide support for the provincial Career and Personal Planning curriculum. If you are a student, parent or teacher, hopefully you will see the linkages between the learning outcomes of the CAPP curriculum and the information presented in this site.

This site was produced by staff of the Secondary to Post-secondary Transitions Team at the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2) under contract to the Ministry of Education. The project was advised by a committee consisting of representatives of:

• BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils
• BC Ministry of Advanced Education, Training and Technology
• BC WIN web site
• Teachers
• Students
• Career Education Society
• University Faculties of Education

The Career Planning for Students and Parents web site is built on the assumption that students and parents could use the material in the following steps. The section on Career Planning provides depth to the first three of these steps. You can move through the pages of the Career Planning section as if you were taking a course in career planning as there are exercises and hints for steps to follow.

1. Career Awareness
   Become aware of various career options and your interests and aptitudes and what kind of work you might like to do.
   
   
2. Career Exploration
   Explore careers that match you interests and skills and discover what work may be like in the future.
   
   
3. Preparing for a Career
   Prepare for a career by building a career planning portfolio, participating in work experience, and learning about work place expectations.
   
   
4. Investigate the options for getting post-secondary education or training.

The section on Post-secondary Education and Training is intended to be a 'one-stop shopping' place for those interested in knowing more about their options in going to post-secondary. This includes trades and vocational training, technical and professional training as well as academic studies. Almost all of the information in this section consists of linkages to web site pages that have more complete information. In each case we have searched the web and chosen the best sites available and provided a short summary of the information you can access. The section consists of the following areas:

• If you need upgrading to go to a post-secondary program, you can search for ways to get the required courses.
• If you have a career in mind and want to find a program to achieve it, you can search the various institutions in BC, Canada or elsewhere by program.
• If you have an institution already in mind you can search the institution for a program you like and find out about registration procedures and costs.
• If you have both an institution and program in mind you can apply on-line.
• You can also check out some hints for making the actual move to a post-secondary institution or look at the various methods of getting financial assistance.
• There is also information on Career Technical Centres, private post-secondary institutions, distance education and apprenticeship.


5. Prepare to enter the world of work.

The School to Work section provides choices for those that are looking at alternatives to post-secondary education or training or who wish to move directly to work. This section also provides information to supplement the other two sections. The first part is intended for those who wish to start working as soon as possible:

• we have listed a selection of Hi-Tech certification programs that can provide entry-level skills in this area. These require short-term training that you can access from the Internet or private training colleges.
• we have listed the short term training programs that will get you working as soon as possible in areas like the Tourism industry.
• for those that are interested in working as an apprentice while still in high school, there is the Secondary School Apprenticeship program
• for those with an entrepreneurial spirit, starting a business is an option. We have connections to some of the sites that provide support for aspiring entrepreneurs.

For many students the years after graduation are exploratory ones, whether you have chosen a career and educational path or not. Travel and volunteer work can offer an opportunity for personal growth, skill building and time and space in which to contemplate options.

• volunteering is an excellent way of building employment skills, gaining experience in an area you find interesting and making the world a better place.
• maybe you have a career and education path in mind already and you want to explore the world. Travel and volunteer work can offer an opportunity for personal growth and skill building.

You can conduct a simple keyword search of the content in Career Planning site by clicking on the Search button and entering your desired keyword into the search box (on the Search page). If you can't think of a keyword then you can select a keyword from the "Keyword Assistant" which contains key words from each of the topic sections. The search engine can "Match Any Word" or "Match All Words". The search engine searches for documents in the "Career Planning for Students and Parents" website, finds all documents that fit your criteria and returns a list with a hyperlink to the document and a brief description.

Further Questions

If you have any further questions about how to get around on the site, please contact us and we will try to get back to you as promptly as possible.

To your left......
The links that run down the left side bar of each page provide a table of contents for the section you are in. A full listing of the topics in each section is available by looking at the Site Map.

Within text on a page........
When reading the text of any topic page you may see a word or phrase that is highlighted by a different colour. If you click on these words you will link to either additional information or to an external web site.

Links to external web sites.......
When you access an external web site from any topic area a new window will open. The Career Planning site will still be open in the background. Before going back to the Career Planning site, close the window for the external site first. This will make it easier to access a new external site if required.