The Path to Career Success

Choosing a career is serious business. These printable PDF handouts provide regional data to help guide students and job seekers through the career exploration process.

Regional Handouts

Video Presentation on the Path to Workforce and Career Success

Student Career Exploration Survey

The Student Career Exploration Survey is a public resource to help schools and communities understand what students want for their future

Why is this important?

Schools and communities invest heavily in career exploration, education pathways, workforce development and youth retention, but often lack consistent local information about what their students actually want. The survey helps answer questions such as: What do students plan to do after high school? What careers interest them? Who shapes those interests? Where do they want to live? And how well do their expectations align with education and employment opportunities?

What is it?

The Student Career Exploration Survey is a short survey about:

Plans after high school
Career and industry interests
College, training and entering the workforce
Career exploration and influences
Job and workplace preferences
Where students want to live
Preparation for life after high school

The goal is to identify broader patterns—not evaluate individual students.

Who will see the data?

Results will be publicly available through an interactive Tableau dashboard on DEED’s website. Schools, service cooperatives, employers, workforce and economic development organizations, community leaders and the public will be able to explore aggregate results. Appropriate suppression rules will be used to protect student privacy.

How will the data be used?

The results can help partners:

Strategically align career exploration and work-based learning
Identify gaps between student interests and local opportunities
Compare student plans with actual graduate outcomes
Help employers understand their future workforce
Support grant applications and community discussions
Better understand whether students see a future in their local community

Career Resources

DEED's Career Pathways tool connects occupational data from DEED's Labor Market Information office with educational programming displaying career fields, clusters, and pathways. The primary goal of this dashboard is to help students understand how their educational path matches employment opportunities, and to inform education curriculum, initiatives, and programming to labor market realities. The tool is designed to help start career exploration with students, parents, and counselors.

For teachers and students who would like guidance using the Career Pathways tool, DEED has also developed a Career Pathways Worksheet to help users walk through how to use and interpret the tool.

LYFT Career Pathways is an excellent resource that provides information for students and jobseekers to consider for their plans after high school. This includes an interactive ROADMAP that walks students and jobseekers through the process of Career Exploration and includes a FREE worksheet to help students and jobseekers track what they learn along their journey. LYFT published a video that explains the importance of career planning: