#235 The Career Lens Most Parents Never Consider Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 00:00

A recurring theme that I hear from parents all the time is, I just don’t know enough to help my kid. Sarah Reinhardt shared this with me when she was at a total loss, not only how to help, but she also wondered if she could really be objective with her daughter. Maybe you’re feeling like that too, you’re considering that you know careers have changed a lot, and there are a lot of jobs that you’ve never even heard of. There’s an AI impact that everybody wants to talk about, and, like Sarah, as she admitted, maybe it’s been years since you were in the job market yourself, or maybe you feel your child actually knows a little bit more than you do about this, and they still don’t have any traction, so how are you supposed to help if you don’t feel like the expert and you’re full of self doubt? What you don’t need is more career knowledge. Let’s just start with that. And actually, I don’t think you need to have all the answers to be able to help. It’s just knowing what to do instead. Hi, I’m Lisa Marca Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity. This is a space where we support families who they’re in the preparation process of confidently launching their 15 to 25 year old. There’s a lot of different milestones and stages in there, but we all ultimately want the same thing, and that is what this community is all about doing together, so let’s figure out what you can do when you don’t feel like the expert. You’re not sure what to do. We want to actually, at times, reach for that natural, easy, low-hanging fruit. When we think about careers, right? I mean, really, like that’s anything. So when we hit some tension in our body, it’s like, what action can I take to quickly get some traction and fix this? It’s only normal, and so when I say that, I’m not criticizing anybody, because I probably have done that five times this week about something else other than career clarity, and when I see parents do this, though, related to the career clarity piece, I actually see them gravitate into three different buckets of what feels like it could actually make a difference. So, the first one is centered all around their kid, right? This is about looking at their passions, their interest, and even their academic fortitude, you know, where they’re showing up really strong at school, whether that’s high school or college, or you know, maybe somewhere else, but you see them having natural academic strengths or aptitudes or giftedness, right? And avoiding that which they are weak in, which we all have weaknesses, so let’s normalize that right. The second bucket, after focusing on their kid and how they see them showing up, is job optics. So it’s really easy to hear to like dig into the data, right? What are the salaries that these jobs are making, and if we’re able to predict job outlook, is it growing? Is it declining? What’s happening in this field? Will it still be here in 1015, 20 years? Looking to see what that’s predicting. And by the way, we don’t have a crystal ball, and this one – it actually pains me – is prestige, right? So, putting prestige before the person is never a good idea, but it can feel comforting if your who your kids showing up as, maybe with that academic fortitude, would be tied possibly to something that carries some prestige with it. So, first we’ve got the kid, low hanging fruit, they’re in your house, you’re spending lots of time with them. Next, we have job optics and data and information, and then the next bucket is outsourcing to time to school, or a quick career assessment. I don’t hate career assessments. I actually love them myself.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 04:33
If you’ve been with me long enough, you’ve probably watched my video that about career confidence and how we can have a compass to guide us. Right, if you haven’t seen it, you can go over and get it at Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash video, and that’s where I talk about the two biggest mistakes that people, that people make, and they’re right there in bucket number three, is with the outsourcing, and it tells you what to do instead, but we’re going to. Like with the topic today, so none of those are actually bad to consider, right? Because you probably heard the list, and you’re like, what’s wrong with that? They’re not bad, and it’s not wrong that you reach for them, but they’re incomplete. So, what I want to do today, when you’re faced with supporting your kiddo and you’re not feeling up to the test. I want to give you a different lens that it’s going to help you see more possibilities, because the lens you use to look at your child, to look at jobs, to look at where that connection is, is going to determine how you and they see the possibilities in front of you, and what I find is a lot of people who start listening or following along or feeling stuck, they’re feeling scarcity, they’re feeling like there aren’t possibilities, and they don’t know where to turn. So, let’s talk about this better framework and the lens that I found to be most helpful for gaining traction. It’s rooted in the US Department of Labor, of all places, and their 23 job families, so the Department of Labor classifies all jobs into 23 buckets, we call them job families. What’s different about this is when, when you’re looking at what schools do and what the Department, US Department of Education does, the Department of education has career clusters, which are actually aimed at studying, like, what do I study to discuss within these this list of career clusters? Right, there are fewer career clusters, but there’s more paths within the clusters. A job family is different. It’s actually, instead of looking at what to study, it’s looking at what kind of work fits who I am. So families often think that what they really want is a major. They’re seeking an answer for what’s that college major, if they have a college-bound kid, or you know what training do we need to get to get my kid to the trade, or you know what, associate’s degree problem, right? A program. Sorry. So, while you think you might want the major, and you think you might want to know what they need to study, here’s what I found on the other side of that. What you really want is a confident path to the future, right? So, both of these that I bring up, career clusters and job families, are very useful. The clusters are helpful for starting early conversations. Think I have people ask me all the time, like Lisa, you support these 15 to 25 year olds, but I have a middle schooler, what should I do now? Career clusters are a great place to start your early conversations, especially as they’re getting ready to start high school, and they’re trying to figure out what classes to take. They have some choices now, right? But these two approaches answer very different questions. The career clusters, the Department of Education, our schools are always aimed at the graduation line. Now, with that said, I will say I meet schools regularly who are starting to take a different approach, and this is just newly emerging, and they align with what I see parents wanting, and that is aiming for the launch line, not just the graduation line, the line that comes later. How do we prepare them? How are we raising adults to prepare them for life? The difference is the timeliness of this lens, because the short-term focus is a graduation line, the long-term focus is the life launch line. So, why do I love organizing careers this way? Because here’s the reality, and you all know this. Jobs are changing, they’re actually rapidly changing, then more rapidly than ever before. I mean, but I’m going to tell you this. If you go back to the 17 and 1800s and 1900s jobs were always changing, my friends, and people are adaptable, so let’s keep that in mind.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 09:00
The jobs are going to change the name or the title of the job is going to change, the industries are going to change, those buckets, you know, are going to look a little different, but the kind of work that energizes somebody at their core is actually much more stable. I’ve talked before about through lines and micro micro pivots, we’re not going to do that in this episode, but that’s the secret sauce. See, job families organize work careers around something that is much more enduring, and it relates to self awareness. One of our best episodes, most popular episodes, I won’t say best, I’m not here to judge my podcasting, but the one of the podcast episodes this year, 2026 that resonated the most with families is one about self awareness being the secret sauce. So go back and listen to that if you want, it’s in its episode 221 I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes, or you can go to Flourish Coaching. Co.com forward slash 221 Okay, everybody’s getting an idea of how we use our URLs around here. Okay, so the self awareness that we unpack in relating it to job families is where you can begin to look through a different lens. So now, if you, if you’re wondering, like, okay, what are the 23 job families, we’re not going to go in depth with them right now, but if you want them, I have a job match list that you can see, and it’s what we use inside Launch Career Clarity. I put a sample of it together. This isn’t something I’m selling, is just to give you a peek at how do we relate wiring to these 23 job families that the US Department of Labor classifies jobs into, so go ahead and get that. It’s at Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash jobs, and that’ll show you what the job families look like. It actually might be a great thing to do right now before you listen to next week’s episode, because we’re going to dig in a little bit more too, and I’ll tell you about it in a second, about these job families and how they work. So, here’s what I want you to do as a parent, not just like know what the job families are, and don’t try to become an expert or have all the answers. I want you, just as we just shifted our lens, I want you to shift how you’re thinking about your role in this process, so instead of trying to have all the answers like Sarah was trying to have, I want you to ask better questions, get curious. I want you to help your young person notice the patterns that are showing up in them that are rooted really in how they can explore jobs, not educational paths, we’re thinking longer term here, so that shift to a long term sustainability with this focus is what you want. I want you, I need to encourage you, maybe first to encourage exploration before commitment, and then you, we do this like trickle down effect, right. So I’m asking you to encourage exploration before commitment, and I want you to tell your child, maybe you even need to tell their teachers or their counselor, but we’re going to explore before we commit, right. And then as they do so, I want you to let loose the the ideas that you’ve already had about this, about how they were born and where they’re headed, and what you want for their life. I want all of you to stay curious, so you need to stay curious. You’re asking them to be curious, you need to stay curious alongside them, because here’s the deal, when our emotions rise and we, you know, we feel that tension in our body, or that conversation becomes tense, or your kid moves into fight, flight, or freeze. I talk about that a lot. When the emotions rise and you become their emotional backstop, good or bad, we get stressed, and when we get stressed, we stop becoming curious, and we start moving into control. Your role isn’t to point them toward a career, it’s to help them to learn how to think, become their co-thinker, their thinking partner, not have all the answers, and adjust the lens, adjust the focus.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 13:18
The world’s changing, and I want to tell you, you don’t need a crystal ball to navigate this. Your child, they don’t have to explore every career, they need you to help them think well, deeply about careers. Now, next week, I told you it’d be useful for you if you go to Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash jobs, you download the 23 job families, because I want to show you something that I think surprises just about every family that I work with. I hear it in the emails, I hear it in social media. I get a lot of questions around this with our Q and A’s within our group. Careers are not nearly straightforward as maybe they look on the surface, or as you’re thinking about them, it’s hard to break our linear thinking about this while designing a future fit. See, some of the best careers actually span multiple job families, and once you understand how to interpret that, you’ll stop being boxed in to a way of thinking, and when you come out of the box, you’re actually going to see a lot more possibilities. So, come back next week, we’re going to dig into really how to approach this design a little bit better. Again, you’ve got other resources here. Go back to episode 221 if you want to dig into career awareness. If you’ve never watched my free video, The Career Identification Compass, go get it at Forge Coaching co.com forward slash video. And my friends, you’re doing great. I’ll see you again next week.