How Do the Headings in Career Planning for High Schoolers Guide You

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How Do the Headings in Career Planning for High Schoolers Work Together?

The headings in Career Planning for High Schoolers guide students by introducing the steps in a process. Explore your interests, Get experience, Train for a career, and Be flexible appear in the order a student would do them, so each heading tells the reader which step comes next and what the section below it will cover.

That is the answer most worksheets and online quizzes are after. When an assignment asks how do the headings in Career Planning for High Schoolers guide the reader, look for the option that mentions steps, a process, or an order. If the assignment wants you to explain your answer, the rest of this page gives you the evidence to do it.

The headings in Career Planning for High Schoolers introduce steps in a process

Read the four main headings out loud in a row and they sound like instructions: explore your interests, get experience, train for a career, be flexible. Every one starts with a verb. That is your first clue. A heading that starts with a verb tells you to do something, and a list of things to do in a set order is a process.

The order also holds up on its own. You cannot pick an internship that suits you until you know what interests you. You cannot choose a training program until you have tried some work and know what you want to train for. And staying flexible only means something once there is a plan to adjust. Each heading depends on the one before it, which is why the headings work as steps in a process.

Torpey also tells you this before the first heading. Her introduction counts the sections off one by one: “The first section talks about exploring your interests,” and then she names what the second, third, fourth and final sections do. Words like first, second and third are signal words for sequence, and the headings that follow keep exactly the order the introduction promised.

How do the headings in Career Planning for High Schoolers rule out the other answer choices?

Teachers word this question in different ways, so the wrong choices vary from one worksheet to the next. They tend to fall into four types, and each one fails for a reason you can check against the text.

• They compare or contrast. No heading sets two careers or two paths against each other. Even In high school and After high school are two stages of one step, one after the other.
• They show cause and effect. No heading says that one thing causes another. Each one tells you what to do next.
• They argue a side. The article gives advice, but its headings are not trying to win a debate. They organize the advice into stages.
• They present data. The article does include a table of starting salaries by college major, but none of the headings is built around numbers.

If an option mentions steps, stages, order or a process, it is almost always the one your teacher wants.

What “Career Planning for High Schoolers” Covers, Heading by Heading

Career Planning for High Schoolers by Elka Torpey ran in the Bureau of Labor Statistics magazine Career Outlook in January 2015. It opens with Megan Lovely, a senior who hopes to become a director and is already interning with her school drama teacher. Then a school career counselor, Mark Danaher, gives the advice the rest of the piece builds on: start exploring as a freshman, because “the high school years go very quickly.”

Here is the whole outline of the article, in the order it appears, with the step each heading introduces.

Explore your interests: learn about yourself, identify careers, do your research

The first heading has three subheadings, and they run in order too. Learn about yourself comes first, since a career search with no starting point is just a long list of jobs. The article asks what you like to learn about, and it points you toward both what you enjoy and what you're good at. Identify possible careers comes next: turn those interests into job titles worth a closer look. Do your research comes last: check the pay, the training required and the outlook for each one, using sources like the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

So the first section is a small process inside the big one. The headings guide you at two levels, and the subheadings guide you inside each step.

Get experience: internships, jobs and other activities

The second step moves from reading about careers to trying them. An internship gives you a look inside a field, the way Lovely's work with her drama teacher does. A part-time job teaches the habits every employer wants, even when the job is unrelated to your goal. Other activities covers experience that is not a job at all, such as volunteering, clubs and school projects.

This step sits second for a reason. Experience tests whatever step one suggested. A student who thinks they love animals and then spends a summer cleaning kennels at a vet clinic learns something no worksheet could tell them, in either direction.

Train for a career: before and after graduation

The third heading splits by time, which is another small sequence. In high school covers what you can do now: the classes you choose, technical courses and anything that earns credit early. After high school covers college, community college, certificates and registered apprenticeships, which pay you while you learn a trade. The salary table sits in this part of the article as a reminder that the training you pick shapes what you earn early on.

Training comes third because it is the costly step, in time and often in tuition. It makes sense to commit years and money to training only after your interests and your experience point the same way.

Be flexible, then find more information

The fourth heading, Be flexible, and follow your dream (the original joins the two halves with a dash), is the only main heading without subheadings. It reminds you that plans change. You might find a new interest in college, or discover a job you had never heard of in ninth grade. The step is to hold the plan loosely enough that it can bend.

For more information is the last section, and it is a list of places to keep reading, so it does not add a step. That is why some teachers say the article has four steps and others say it has five sections. Both are right: four steps, then a resource list. A boxed sidebar titled Put forth your best you sits apart from the numbered sections.

Why Headings Work This Way in Informational Texts Like Career Planning for High Schoolers

The headings question is a test of a bigger reading skill: spotting how an informational text is organized. Once you can do that, you can answer any version of the question, about any article your class reads next.

What headings do for a reader of an informational text

The purpose of headings in an informational text is to show the reader how the information is organized and where each part begins. They split a long piece into chunks, name the topic of each chunk and let you find what you need without reading every word again. They also preview. Before you read a section, its heading tells you what to expect, so you read with a question already in mind.

Writers organize informational texts in a handful of standard ways, and reading teachers usually name five: description, sequence, problem and solution, cause and effect, and compare and contrast. Headings are the quickest way for a reader to spot which structure a writer chose. In Career Planning for High Schoolers the structure is sequence, and the headings show it.

How headings and subheadings work together in this article

Headings and subheadings play different roles. A main heading names a big idea, and the subheadings under it break that idea into parts. Here, Explore your interests is the step, and Learn about yourself, Identify possible careers and Do your research are the smaller moves inside it. Read together, they work like an outline: you can see the plan of the whole article, and the plan of each section, before you read a single paragraph.

In this article the subheadings follow the same logic as the main headings. In high school comes before After high school. Learn about yourself comes before Do your research. The sequence runs all the way down, which makes the answer to the headings question even easier to defend.

One purpose of headings, said in a single phrase

If a question asks for one phrase that describes a purpose of headings, the safe answers are short: to organize information, to tell the reader what a section is about, or to help the reader find information quickly. For this particular article, the most precise phrase is the one at the top of this page: to introduce the steps in a process.

How to Answer the Career Planning for High Schoolers Headings Question on a Test

Multiple choice is easy once you know the answer. A short written response takes more work, because you have to prove it. Most versions of this question are graded on the same pattern English teachers use everywhere: make a claim, give evidence from the text, then explain how the evidence supports the claim.

A model answer you can adapt

Here is a model to adapt. Put it in your own words before you hand it in, because teachers can spot copied text quickly.

Notice the three parts. The first sentence is the claim. The middle two sentences are evidence, and they quote two kinds of it, the headings and the introduction. The last sentence explains why the evidence proves the claim. If your teacher wants a longer answer, add one more piece of evidence, such as the subheadings In high school and After high school, which also run in time order.

The same answer covers the related question of why headings are important in informative texts. Headings make the organization visible, and a reader who can see the organization understands more, remembers more and can go straight back to the part they need. Headings are important in informative texts because they turn a block of facts into a map the reader can follow.

Three traps cost points on this question:

1. Retelling instead of answering. Summarizing every section of the article does not explain what the headings do.
2. Quoting one heading and stopping. One heading is a topic. You need at least two to show an order.
3. Saying the headings “make it easier to read” and nothing else. True, but too vague for full credit. Say how: they show the steps in the order you would take them.

Turning the Career Planning for High Schoolers Headings Into Your Own Plan

Once the homework is done, the outline is still useful. The four steps make a sound plan for any high school student, and they fit neatly into ninth through twelfth grade. Our full walkthrough of career planning for high schoolers goes deeper on picking fields to test. Here is how the article's own steps map onto each grade.

Grade by grade: the article's steps as your plan

Spreading the steps across four years gives each one time to change your mind before the next one costs money. Students who wait until senior year try to explore, get experience and choose training all at once, and they usually skip the first two. For activities sorted by grade, see our page on exploring careers in high school, and if you want something to fill in, these printable career exploration worksheets follow a similar order.

Learn about yourself: interests versus real strengths

Step one is where most plans go soft. The usual advice stops at what you like. Torpey's article asks for two things, what you enjoy and also what you're good at, and most students only answer the first half, because enjoying something is easy to notice and skill is hard to judge from the inside.

The two can point in different directions. A student who loves cooking shows may find the pace of a restaurant kitchen miserable. A student who never gave accounting a thought may be the one friends trust to split the bill and keep track of the money on a group trip, and may like doing it. What you like tells you where your attention goes. What you are good at, and can keep doing well on a hard day, tells you which work will hold up once the novelty fades.

Judging that second half is tricky, because on a simple self-rating you can mark every trait as strong. This is where a structured tool can help. Pigment's career test uses forced-choice questions: each pair makes you pick one way of working over the other, so every trait cannot come out on top, and the picks add up to a pattern that a single self-rating would hide. The report also names the pace and setting you can keep up week after week, which most worksheets never ask about. Pigment was built with working adults in mind, so it suits a junior or senior who is ready to read a detailed report better than a ninth grader. For a younger student, our roundup of tests built for teens and a few good conversations are a good place to begin.

How parents can help a teen follow these career planning steps

If you are a parent wondering how to guide your high schooler toward career goals, the headings give you a simple job description: help with each step in order, and resist jumping straight to the college decision.

• Explore your interests. Ask what they lose track of time doing, and tell them what you have watched them do well. Teens often cannot see their own strengths, and one specific example from you carries weight.
• Get experience. Use your network. One call to a friend in a field can turn into a day of shadowing or a summer job.
• Train for a career. Put every option on the table, including apprenticeships and two-year programs, and talk about cost early.
• Be flexible. Let the plan change without treating it as a failure. A teen who drops an idea after trying it has learned something useful.

For parents, there is also our list of planning tools for parents of teens, sorted by stage. And the next time a worksheet asks what these headings do for a reader, you will have two answers: the one for the test, and the one you can use.

Career Planning for High Schoolers Headings: FAQ