What Students Want from Future Readiness Preparation

The 2022 Naviance Student Survey Report indicates that 47% of students wish their school did more to help them discover their strengths and interests, and 40% wish their school provided more opportunities to explore career options. This data is even more significant when contextualized within additional report findings, which show fewer students enrolling in college and opting to directly enter the job market after graduation instead. 

Why is a future readiness program essential for students?

Students are clearly signaling the need and desire for more resources that support self-discovery and postsecondary path exploration. If students haven’t been able to reflect on their curiosities, their strengths, and their areas of interest, they’re less likely to embark on a career path that feels meaningful and satisfying.  

With PowerSchool Naviance, students and counselors have access to self-discovery assessments designed to help students understand their learning styles, personality type, skills, and intelligence. The assessments are provided by trusted industry leaders such as Gallup and AchieveWorks, so schools and districts can ensure students are receiving vetted and research-backed content. As students learn about themselves, they can better identify possible career paths that will lead to a meaningful and fulfilling future.

How to Use Naviance Self-Discovery Tools

The self-discovery tools available in Naviance create a holistic picture that helps each student better understand themselves. From thinking about how they would behave in workplace scenarios to reflecting on the values and ideas that motivate them, students can create a comprehensive portrait of who they are. That deepened understanding improves their ability to plan their postsecondary path, seek out experiential opportunities in their fields of interest, and articulate what makes them special as an individual. 

Naviance self-discovery tools can be used in three ways:

1. To help students uncover their strengths and interests.

• The Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsExplorer® assessment evaluates 34 CliftonStrengths themes, which are then broken down into four separate domains: strategic thinking, relationship building, influencing, and executing. Students receive a personalized report identifying their talents.

2. To help students learn about themselves with research-backed assessments.

• AchieveWorks Intelligences® uses the multiple intelligences theory to generate a comprehensive, personalized report covering nine distinct intelligences such as interpersonal intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence. Students discover cross-intelligence strengthening strategies to build on current talents.
• AchieveWorks Personality® (formerly Do What You Are) uses personality types to suggest careers and clusters that might be a good match for a student. Unlike values, skills, and interests, which can change as we age, personality type remains constant throughout our life and contains a set of basic drives and motivations that can be instrumental in selecting a career. Students will be better equipped to make decisions and set goals using these insights.

3. To support student alignment of assessment results and career exploration.

• The Career Cluster Finder helps students identify specific career clusters that match their interests. Students learn how well each of the 16 National Career Clusters fits their current interests and qualities.
• Career Interest Profiler captures interests to help students identify personality traits and suggests careers that they might be interested in based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor. The Career Interest Profiler maps student results to John Holland’s six personality types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. Naviance reporting tools give teachers, advisors, and administrators comprehensive information regarding student career interests to guide curriculum planning, career days, and other activities.
• The Career Key is a research-backed measure of Holland’s six personality types. Students are matched with careers based on their identified Holland code combination. The assessment is fully integrated with Naviance.

Students are asking their schools to help them discover who they are. With the right resources, self-discovery can be an enlightening and informative experience that sheds light on opportunities students may never have considered on their own.