Post #7

10/16/12

First of all, I’d like to second what Wayne said in his post about being extremely surprised that only 22 percent of the occupations in the United States require a bachelor’s degree. I, too, thought it was much higher. Again, just like Wayne said, I’m probably biased; I may have this particular view simply because of my situation in life: I have a family that values higher education very much, I’m currently in a master’s degree program, and I have never entertained the idea of applying for or taking a job that required LESS than my highest level of education. So, in retrospect, although I’m surprised by the statistic, I guess I’m not surprised that I was surprised by it. I hope that makes sense…

Like I said, I was surprised when I first read that. But after further consideration, I think we could look at it another way. The exact quote was, “Approximately 22 percent of the occupations in this country require a bachelor’s degree” (Brown, 2012, p. 178). I interpreted this, initially, to mean that 22 percent of the occupations require AT LEAST a bachelor’s degree. But maybe the statistic actually means that 22 percent of jobs in this country need ONLY a bachelor’s degree. I’m not sure how likely this explanation is, but it makes more sense to me and would be a less shocking interpretation.

Switching gears, I too think that the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database would have been extremely helpful if I had known about it when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to major in, which college I wanted to go to, etc. eight years ago. Even though, as I’ve stated many times in this class, all throughout middle school and high school I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, but viewing detailed information about the worker characteristics, worker requirements, experience requirements, occupational requirements, occupation-specific requirements, and occupation characteristics for this job may still have given more information about what I was getting myself into.

Similarly, the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) would also have been helpful to me if I had pursued or received more career guidance than I did in high school. I too wondered, like Wayne mentioned, if the OOH would have predicted the downturn in the number of teaching positions available; the fact that schools are cutting budgets and teaching positions across the board makes me increasingly grateful that I did make the switch from education to psychology. It’s hard to tell whether more detailed information about the job requirements, or even a prediction of lower job availability in my chosen field would have swayed me in the decision to major in education as an 18-year-old, but either way I think I could have benefited, and I feel like I missed out on something by not getting the experience of learning about my chosen field in such a way earlier on; I think that using such resources as O*NET and OOH would be very beneficial to everyone, regardless of which point in their career development journeys they are on.

Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.