Listen to part of a radio programme about career prospects for first-time university students and complete the blanks in the sentences with up to three words. 0 is an example.
Example:
0 Many students have no idea what they want to do for their career.
1 Robert Shewchuk has written a guide for young people and their parents called ___________________ .
2 Robert Shewchuk went through the same experience as many young people today at the age of _____________________ .
3 The councellor Robert asked for advice about the careers available for him couldn’t __________________ , so he decided to do that himself.
4 The first thing parents have to consider is what their kids are like and ________________________.
5 Parents have to look at their children’s interests, motivation and ___________________________ and try not to impose their ideas on their children.
6 According to the reporter, some parents think of a dream career for their children, but there might be ___________________________ in the workforce for it.
7 In Robert’s opinion, the old idea of workers going through one career, one job for _________________ is something of the past.
Hi I'm Marcy Markusa with CBC. Thousands of students head to university for the first time every fall but many don’t have any idea what they want to do (0) for their career. Their parents often worry about spending money on a university education their son or daughter may never use. Robert Shewchuk helps people sort out what kind of training they need for the careers available in today’s economy and what kinds of careers best match their interests and skill set. He’s recently written a book called (1) Careers for Kids, a guide for young people and their parents. We spoke with him on the morning show.
Good morning to you.
Good morning Marcy. Thank you.
So how did you get into writing this in the first place? I understand it came from a question that you had when you were (2) seventeen, right?
Well the original, ya actually, it was about twenty years ago today to be honest, ah I was thinking about going to University of Winnipeg and ah I asked the counsellor at the time, y’know, how do I figure out what kind of careers are out there and I was lookin’ at all the buildings and the person couldn’t (3) answer the question. So I thought y’know what, there’s gotta be somebody out there that can do that and I found out there wasn’t too many things goin’ on for that, so I decided to get into the career myself.
How do you help parents help their kids figure out what they want to do without crossing the line of telling them what they should be if maybe the student or young person doesn’t want to do that.
Well to be honest, the first thing that you should do is to consider, you know, what your kids are like and (4) who they are. When you’re looking at a career planning service/scenario, you have to start looking at yourself first, so the first thing that parents have to do is say, okay, let’s figure out what my kids are actually all about. What kind of interests do they have? What kind of motivations do they have? What are their talents, their (5) specific individual talents? So if you decide to say you should do what I do, it may not match your skills and talents that they have. So the first thing you wanna do is say to the parents, y’know, don’t ah, don’t ah don’t tell them what to do.
Don’t impose what you might think.
Yes.
Okay. How important is it for parents to live in the reality of today’s workforce? Because they may have a dream or think that their child is going to be a wonderful “pick a career here” and there’s (6) no jobs in the workforce for it.
Well that’s a huge problem, one of the reasons I wrote the book. I mean we are talking about a fourteen percent unemployment rate for youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, under-employment is actually quite worse than that, when you look at that, it’s twenty percent plus, so you’re right. To be honest, most people nowadays, including myself, and maybe even yourself, that idea of going through one career, one job for (7) forty years is gone. Most people are going to be expected to probably go through two or three or even four completely different careers in their lifetime.
