Characteristics of farm family members involved in workshops that are designed to assist them in developing career plans and making transitions to other careers are described. Age, sex, educational level, and career change characteristics of workshop participants are presented. Vocational identity scores using My Vocational Situation, interest patterns based on the Self‐Directed Search, and 6‐month follow‐up data are also presented to describe the farm family members served through this intervention.
My family went back four generations on this piece of land. Farming wasn't a job; it was a way of life. I couldn't go to the auction. I couldn't see it all being taken. I feel like such a failure.
Many of us in career development suffer from the &dquo;Field of Dreams Syndrome-&dquo; if we build a career center, they will come. We soon find that most students will not come to the career center just because we are there. We can plan our programs using all the career theory and lists of developmental tasks we want. If students see no immediate practical need for something we have, they see no purpose in using our services. Some researchers have categorized many of our current students as members of Generation X, with a desire for career services that are &dquo;fast, ... include concrete information of immediate practical use and ... directly relevant to their personal situation.&dquo; (Cannon, 1990) Other writers have expressed the need to keep career information simple, with minimum verbiage, a sensitivity to individual and individual-group needs and with a creative use of words and visuals. (Bachhuber, 1992) Outreach from your career center to student organization meetings, classes, residence halls and greek houses can literally bring your information to where students live, and make your information more immediate, personal, direct and creative. Like many others, our career center struggled with low attendance at career programs. Programs always seemed to be scheduled at the wrong time, or to be about a topic that was not a current student concern. We decided to formalize an outreach program, taking career information out on campus when it was requested. For simplicity, we used the Jepsen and Laisure (1981) model for program planning. This
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.