The Take Hold of Your Future career planning guide consists of 14 brief chapters that step through career development, planful decision-making, and preparing for work in the 21st century. Each chapter provides resources to support the text, along with discussion questions, experiential activities, and a section for personal notes to promote involvement and continual planning.

This text will be a resource for students during college planning and occupation selection, and will continue to assist transitions throughout their lifetime.

Chapter 1: Career Planning in the 21st Century
Trends defined in the final years of the 20th century will continue to affect career planners in the 21st century. In this chapter many of these trends which affect jobs and workers are reviewed. They include changes in the employee-employer relationship, changes in how work tasks are performed and where, the impact of the Internet and other technologies, and economies that employers are implementing in order to remain competitive in a global market. The implications of these trends for the career planning and skill upgrading of individuals in the 21st century workforce are reviewed.
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Chapter 2: Life Goals and Roles
Life and career are made up of activities, satisfactions, and frustrations that occur in each of the "roles" that we play--specifically, roles such as worker, student, parent, spouse, and citizen. This chapter defines those roles and proposes that life goals are attained through thoughtful construction of them. An activity gives the reader an opportunity to keep a weeklong diary to help illustrate his or her current life roles, the activities that are involved, and the time he or she spends in each role.
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Chapter 3: Environment and Self
Self-concept is the integrating life force of each individual. A part of one's self-concept, called the "vocational self-concept," has a powerful effect on career development and occupation selection. Information is provided on the impact of positive and negative reinforcement on self-concept and how self-concept is implemented in many roles throughout life. The chapter will also discuss how internal and external forces combine to support career development and the recurring tasks described in this process.
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Chapter 4: The Career Decision-Making Process
Decision-making skill is central to the control of one's own life. Though the number and frequency of transitions requiring decision making may increase in the 21st century, the process will remain the same. This chapter defines a planful process for decision making as well as several other models. Activities in the chapter provide the opportunity to practice the planful model.
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Chapter 5: Step 1-Becoming Aware of the Need to Make a Career Decision
Interests are formed as a result of internal and external factors and a combination of influences, such as reinforcement. This chapter expands on this concept and introduces the Kuder Career Search with Person Match interest inventory as a means to measure interests to assist career planning and decision making. Readers will have the opportunity to join over 100 million people who have completed a Kuder® inventory as a part of their career development process.
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Chapter 6: Step 2-Learning about or Reevaluating Self
Continuing the process of evaluating self-attributes, this chapter focuses on skills and work-related values. There are specific skills required for successful job performance in each career cluster. This chapter includes use of the research-based Kuder Skills Assessment to help determine current skill level in each cluster and how the results relate to career choices. The chapter will also discuss the influence of values on career decisions and how they can help shorten a long list of occupational possibilities. By taking Super's Work Values Inventory-revised, readers will rate the importance he or she places on the 12 work-related values.
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Chapter 7: Step 3-Identifying Occupational Alternatives
The previous chapters assisted the process of evaluating interests, skills, and work values. This chapter will utilize gathered self-information to help identify related occupations and programs of study. To begin this process the chapter details a system of organizing occupations into career clusters. The history of this classification system will be discussed and the Kuder® Career Clusters will be described in length and aligned with the familiar Holland codes for personality types.
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Chapter 8: Step 4-Obtaining Information about Identified Alternatives
This step in the career planning process focuses on gathering information through external resources, such as Web sites, print reference materials, or computer-based guidance systems. Readers will look at job characteristics, including educational entry level, occupational requirements, and outlook to determine how various options relate to identified interests, skills, and work values. This exploration and data gathering process will make it possible to prioritize alternatives.
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Chapter 9: Step 5-Choosing Among Alternatives
This chapter helps readers move one step closer to taking action and making a decision to move forward with one alternative. This chapter focuses on some general principles to making a choice and describes various ways to get real world experience about an occupation prior to the decision, including internships, job shadowing, part-time work, etc. A decision-making grid is provided as part of the chapter activities to help determine if each alternative will help attain identified values and goals.
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Chapter 10: Step 6-Making Educational Choices
While obtaining information about occupational alternatives, readers were asked to consider their educational choices. There are many postsecondary paths that may be taken and this chapter describes those options. This chapter also provides online resources for continued exploration of colleges and majors. The Kuder Career Planning System links directly to a listing of colleges and majors that relate to one's top-ranking interests and skills cluster.
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Chapter 11: Step 7-Getting a Job
This chapter discusses the transition to or within the workforce and lists items that should receive consideration at this step of the career decision-making process. Some common ways of finding jobs are described and online resources are provided to help identify job openings that satisfy interests, skills, and work values.
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Chapter 12: Job-Seeking Tools: Resumes, Cover Letters, and References
This chapter is devoted to learning about and giving examples of different types of resumes -- chronological, functional, and electronic. It also gives guidelines for preparation of a good cover letter and provides examples. As readers begin, they can access a career portfolio through the Kuder Career Planning System to record and organize this information. This chapter describes the process of building the portfolio and utilizing the information to create a professional resume online.
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Chapter 13: Job Interviewing
This chapter provides instruction about what to do prior to an interview, during an interview, and after an interview. It describes the purpose of a job interview and provides instruction about how to deal effectively with its various phases. A list of common interview questions is provided to assist preparation.
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Chapter 14: Transitions
Finding and getting settled into a good first job is an accomplishment. But, many events will occur in life that bring on transitions -- in the Worker role and other life roles. This chapter describes the nature of transitions and how one can cope with them.
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