How to Choose an In-Demand Career

  Hello, thank you for joining this webinar on how to choose an in demand career. In this webinar you will learn how to use MIFA Pathway, a free college and career planning platform, to get details on career trends, job growth, Potential and different careers that are popular in different parts of the country, all designed to help you make a plan for the future.

This webinar is part of MIFA's ongoing The Time Is Now campaign, which provides great resources for students who are still deciding on plans for the future. My name is Asia Stupart, and I am the MIFA Pathway Program Coordinator. A little bit about MIFA. MIFA is the state authority which was created by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1982.

And we are committed to helping families plan, save, and pay for college. Just a quick housekeeping note about how you can participate in this webinar. So to my left you should see audio settings. This will allow you to control volume levels. The chat feature for this webinar is disabled, but if you would like to communicate with me during this webinar, definitely utilize the Q& A, uh, button on the Zoom menu.

If you would like to get my attention, please use the raise hand feature. And then also live transcription is available if you would like to see closed captioning. Last but not least, before we get started, If you at any point in time have to leave this webinar, please just feel free to click the red leave button at the corner of the zoom menu.

All right, now we're going to get started.

All right. So I am on me for pathway dot org. As mentioned earlier, MIFA pathway is a free college and career planning destination for students in grades 6 through 12 to help them think about post secondary success and planning. One of my favorite features or things about MIFA pathway is that MIFA pathway is It's really beneficial for all students.

We know that there are no two journeys that are alike and METHA Pathway really supports all students. So whether you are thinking about college, um, four year college or two year college or going to the military or workforce or any, anything in between, there is something for everyone. I am going to click on I am a student.

Now, if you are not familiar with MIPHA pathway or you do not have a MIPHA pathway account, one thing that you'll want to do is create one. So I'm going to select register here. The registration process is pretty straightforward. You'll want to put in your first name, last name, date of birth, city or town your school is in, and then the school.

Once you hit submit, you'll be brought to another registration page, which you'll be prompted to just answer a couple of questions. And then you'll also be able to input the answers to three security questions. Once you do all of that, then you'll be able to submit and you will also be able to have your very own MIFA Pathway account.

Since I already have an account, I'm just going to simply sign in with my username and password.

Alright, so this is the MIFA Pathway dashboard. We can see that my student's name is Zoe. She goes to Brockton Champion High School and she is in the 12th grade. One thing I will mention about Mipha Pathway, which is pretty cool, is the site translation. So, if you need to translate Mipha Pathway into another language, Mipha Pathway translates currently into six languages.

languages. Those languages include English, Chinese, Simplified, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. So I'll quickly show what MIFA Pathway looks like in another language. We have Spanish selected just so that you can get the idea of MIFA Pathway. Um, and it's ability to translate in another language.

We'll do one more. We'll just select Haitian Creole.

You can see it in Haitian Creole. And then we'll just go back to English. All right. So since today we'll be talking about how to, um, you know, select a career that's in demand, I'm going to hover over to the top of the navigation bar. So in this pane right here, You can see home, create profile, discover careers, build career plan, search colleges, manage applications, and pay for college.

I'm going to select discover careers. And one thing I want to highlight really quickly is the career search. So if you are thinking about a career and you're not sure about what it actually entails, or you want to learn more about growth opportunities, the career search is a great place because it allows you the student to search or filter.

By different education levels. So we have high school or G. D. vocational training or two year degree programs for your degree and also masters or doctorate level career opportunities to my left on the left hand side. There is the opted option to filter or search by categories. Interest values and skills, and then also within the career search, you can select a variety of career cards.

So if you want to see careers that relate to education and training, all you simply have to do is select the card and it will bring up careers that relate to that particular career that you selected. So here we can see a variety of interesting careers that fit the education and training category that we've selected.

Maybe this is not a career category that you are interested in. Maybe you would like to hover over and learn a bit more about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. We can select those categories and we can see that there are 91 careers that relate to that category as you begin to use me for pathway to think about post secondary planning, one great feature that you can take advantage of are the interest values and skills assessment.

So as you are taking the assessments and you get to the results pages, you can actually integrate your results into the career search and many other features within the pathway allow you to connect your results to career search and other features as well. So we can see that based upon my interests.

Results that these are my top dominant categories. So yellow would be investigative and then that and then the blue would also be realistic. Purple is artistic and red is social while green is conventional. So I'm just going to select a career just so that we can see some information about that before we get into the, um, investigate your future activities.

So here is a career that I've selected as an example, a biostatistician. Uh, they develop and apply biostatistical theory and methods to study of life sciences. You can view the career category, any growth opportunities. any education levels, um, wage information. And a new feature within Meathood Pathway is the ability to tie, make programs of study to a career.

So you can see that these options are different programs of study. So I'm just going to select. One of these that you can see. So students can see that I go back one page. Um, these are hyperlinked so they will be able to see a college or university that offers that same program that I just selected. But to learn more about this particular career, you can either save it to your list, you can view the career path, you can view a day of the different activities that this particular career does, how to prepare similar careers like this, and then last but not least, a video about this particular career.

Now I'm going to move over now to the investigate your future. The Investigate Your Future activities feature four different activities, all that are designed to help students think about and also explore skills, career growth opportunities, and where across the country has the highest concentration of jobs.

Students can also use this to view their career path, so maybe they want to start at a particular career. And they want to be able to see what other careers relate to that career. They can do, they can use the career path to do that. So I'm going to start with the Now Trending.

The Now Trending allows you to view current careers and skills in demand. The first step is the filtering. So you can filter by location and then by career category. So I'm going to select for my location. I'm going to select Massachusetts. And then I going to do two things. I'm going to leave career category as listed as all categories and just so that we can see currently where in Massachusetts, where the careers that are currently in demand, we can see that these are the skills.

That are in demand in Massachusetts. And then last but not least, we can also see that these are the companies that are hiring in Massachusetts. Across all categories that are within the pathway within this drop down if students find a career that is of interest to them, they can heart this career.

They, they would like to view the career path. They can select this button right here. And then they can also select the magnifying glass to view jobs on LinkedIn. Next is with regard to the skills. Any skills that are highlighted in blue or the bubble is blue, then that means that these are skills that students have already added on their profile.

So we can see that top skills are coordination, time management, and complex problem solving. So we encourage you definitely utilize the pathway to not only explore about careers that are in demand, but use it to build out your portfolio and your profile and have a nice place to act to showcase your skills.

Any experiences you have, um, can also create a resume with any good halfway as well. And then if you want to see any companies that are hiring, you simply kill. Select the magnifying glass and that will take you to LinkedIn. So you can see that Amazon, Partners, MGH, CVS, Boston Public, Anthem, Blue Cross, Connected, Home Care, LLC, Lowe's, Raytheon, and Whole Foods Market.

Our companies currently that are hiring across Massachusetts and across all categories, but maybe you are a student who wants to see careers that pertain to a particular category. Um in massachusetts, so i'll select education And training so we can see we'll still keep massachusetts because um, that's where we currently are located So we can see that there the careers have changed so we can see teachers and Coaches and tutors are examples of careers.

So i'm just going to favorite A career so we can see what that looks like. We can see that these are these tech skills and these are additional skills that are in demand. And then these are the companies hiring.

Now we're going to hover over next to our other investigate your future activity, which is popular places.

Popular places is another activity that will allow you to choose a category or occupation to see which states have the highest concentration of job listings. So to do that, we're going to stick with our education and training, and then we'll keep our occupation selected as all jobs that fit under education and training.

And then after this, we'll also, um, just kind of. Narrow it down a little bit. So you can actually see other careers or occupations and then where they're located. So here we can see that the red are jobs where there are locations with jobs that are over around over 10, 000 jobs. Orange are jobs, are states that have jobs between 5, 000 and 10, 000.

Green are states that have jobs between 2, 500 and 5, 000. And blue are jobs that have, are states that have less than 2, 500 jobs. One of the coolest things about this particular activities, um, popular places is really being able to hover over to each state. So I'm selecting, we'll select Washington, or I'm sorry, Montana.

And we can see in that in Montana, these are the careers. We can still, same way we could do with the previous activity we were just showing, we can favorite careers, we can view them all linked in, and then we can view the career path. Maybe we want to see jobs in Massachusetts. Again, similar, but a little bit different.

And maybe we will go down south to Texas. One thing I'll also mention is, um, all the data that comes from, that's within the Investigate Your Future activities, these are all real time data. So, they are all sourced from Burning Glass Technologies. So, these are updated periodically and incorporates real time data as well.

Next we have our Looking Ahead.

So, with Looking Ahead, students can view current demand and future growth opportunities. The filtering option is similar as we saw in the other two activities, so we'll select a state,

and then we will select our Keeping with the Education and Training category. So we can see that on my left, where it says current demand, these are the current job openings. So we can see 13, 000 for preschool teachers except special education. Um, 12, 000 for teachers assistants. We have some opportunities for elementary school teachers, coaches, and scouts, and also education administrators in post secondary education.

Thank you. So I'm just going to select one of these options and this will bring a student to learn more about a career card. So we can see that this is a brief sentence of what preschool teachers do. We can see the required education level is vocational training or two year degree. And we can also see the median wage information.

If a student would like to learn more information about a career, they can simply select more info. If they would like to save this career to their list. They can select save this career to my right. We can view projected growth opportunities. And these are projected growth opportunities in careers through 2030.

So I'm going to select preschool teachers, except special education. So we can see that the projected growth for this particular career is up 21%. And the information is similar to what we just saw on the left hand side for job openings and students can view information about the career and also save the career to their list.

Maybe you have a student who wants to view careers from a different location. Maybe they are in Maine and they are still interested in education currently, but they're curious about finance. So we can see the drastic difference in location and category. So, uh, for finance in Maine, these are the numbers on my left.

For careers such as tellers, um, managers, insurance sales agents, and then to my right, we can see that the projected growth for these careers are also a little bit different than the career that, and the location that we were just looking at. This is helpful to view a side by side of current demand opportunities and, um, projected growth opportunities of a particular career.

Next, we have the career path.

The career path allows you to select a career category. Go back for a second.

Okay. So the career ca, the career path, you would select a career category. We'll stick with our education and training. We will view our occupation as elementary school teacher

so we can see that the starting block in the middle is our, um, in this case, it's our targeted, uh, career, the. Yellow or orange boxes are careers that are similar to this career. The red boxes are stepping stones, while the blue boxes are advancement careers. So essentially what this means that if a student has a goal, let's say their goal is to be an elementary school teacher, that's where they would like to endeavor to.

Students can see that a stepping stone or a starting spot could be to work as a library assistant or even as a preschool teacher. Let's say that they start as a preschool teacher and there's... thinking about how they can laterally transition from a preschool teacher. Maybe they want to go into being a special ed teacher.

So now they've transitioned laterally to being a special ed teacher. Let's say that they finally made it from a special ed teacher to an elementary teacher. And they have a desire to pursue more lateral advancement. So students can see that if they were to progress higher in their career path, they could be a educational administrator.

Um, for kindergarten through secondary education, they could also, um, be instructional coordinators and each block on the career path, once the student selects it, they'll be able to learn more about their career. Again, they can save that career to their list.

They can view more information about that. And then maybe they want to explore a different career. So maybe instead of an instructional coordinator, they're more interested in self enrichment teachers. They can view that career as well. So we'll just save this to our list. Another cool thing about the career path activity is the ability to filter from on the left, from my left and my right.

So there are careers that are of interest to students. They can explore related careers. So I'm going to select health care, including nursing, and then I also will select hospitality and food. So we can see that there are a couple of options that a student can start with as stepping stones. There are options to laterally transition into, and then there are options to transition to or, um, and advance into.

Students can also change their career. So if they do not want to or endeavor to be working in education, they can simply change their career category again, and they can also select a different

Last but not least before we conclude this webinar is the career list. So every activity or every career that a student is saving in the career search, they can see that on this career list. The career list is a great way for students to keep track of any careers or any paths. That they might want to explore once they are in college and beyond students can easily remove a career by selecting the X button and they can favorite a career by selecting the heart icon to the heart icon will go from gray to blue.

And then, of course, students can view a description of that career and then select this green add more careers button to add more careers to their list. Thank you for your attention.

All right. Any questions so far? Definitely feel free to put them in the Q& A and I will be sure to address any and all questions that you have before we conclude this webinar.

If there are no questions for this webinar, I'm going to just share a little bit more information about how you can connect with MIFA on social media. We are on Facebook at Facebook. com slash MIFA MA. We are on, um, Instagram at Mipha underscore M A. We are on Twitter at Mipha Tweets. You can find us on LinkedIn at linkedin.

com slash company slash MIFA. We are on YouTube at youtube. com slash MIFA counselor. And last but not least, we are on podcasts wherever you stream your podcasts, um, at MIFA. org slash MIFA. Dash podcast. As always, thank you so much for joining this webinar. If you have any questions about any of the content that was covered in this webinar or any webinar in general, um, definitely utilize our number 1 804 4 9 MEFA.

That's 1 804 4 9 6 3 3 2. Or you can also email us at college planning at MIFA dot org. Thank you so much for joining and I hope everyone has a great evening.