The Parents’ Guide to Career Planning for Your Twentysomething

Almost every career book is for the career seeker, often of varied ages. But this book is for parents trying to help their college or post-college age child transition effectively into a happy and successful career. The first half directly addresses parents. The second half is designed for the twentysomething directly and/or for parents to help guide their twentysomething. The genesis of the book emanated from career counseling work with parents who felt helpless as they watched their twentysomething children struggle with career issues. This guide will help parents help their children navigate the increasingly complex world of career choices. If the readers of this book are typical of our company's clients, they are the parents of: (1) young adults who graduated from college but have not found work that has placed them on a career path of their choice (2) college students who are facing the college-to-career transition (3) high school students, who, prior to investing in college, want to have a conversation about choosing their career Through imparting lessons that will illustrate: Why parents must overcome this generation's cultural barrier against advising their adult children, update their original career programming and understand how to help their children navigate career-based psychological issues. Moreover, parents will learn why the employer-employee relationship of the last century is no more; how having the ability to create one's own work will create invincibility; and why parents must learn to be effective advisors The second part of the book will directly help your twentysomething understand their Personality Preferences, Core Motivations, and Values, Interests, Aptitudes, Skills, and Credentials, Geographical Preferences in order to find a career path that will lead to happiness and success. If you feel helpless about helping your struggling twentysomething find a happy and successful career, this book will give you hope and help.

If your twentysomething is struggling with career issues, you likely feel ill-equipped to help. You might be right. Unless your own experiences have schooled you in the way the New World of Work operates, realize that some part of the way you understood careers has radically changed. More significantly, you now are experiencing that the college to career transition is no longer the sure thing it seemed to be. This book is designed to help you help your twentysomething. Despite the radical change in college to career transitions that have occurred in the last few decades, parents still tend to conflate the college decision with the career decision: "Once we get Johnny off to college, he'll figure out his career." This misguided thinking was never quite right. Even in the go-go 80s and 90s, colleges did a lousy job of career preparation. But the work world revolution of the last few decades has exacerbated the problem. Economic realities—not an extension of helicoptering parents—have created the need for greater parental involvement with career issues. I run The Learning Consultants, the largest private educational consultancy in Connecticut. The number of parents who have called seeking advice for their college-age children has multiplied exponentially in the last ten years. Those that live far away and would prefer not to meet virtually would ask, "What can I do for my children?" That's what this book addresses. What can parents do to help their children find happy and successful careers? Why the enhanced need for career advice from parents? I started providing career counseling services before The Great Recession of 2007-09. Even then, most of our recent college graduate clients had experienced some form of post-collegiate misery. The problem for those clients was the mismatch between their career path and their particular interests, values, and preferences. But the career crisis for young adults has been magnified exponentially due to the restructured post-Great Recession economy. There is a far greater need to not only find a career match among many options but to simply find a career building job. Moreover, the resources to parents and children alike on the subject have been scarce or ineffective. The disconnect between our educational system and career choice has never wider. Few twentysomethings have wise adults in their lives, outside of their parents, who can guide them. This leaves parents as the continuing source of guidance in their lives. This book will help you help your children.

Through building his first company, The Learning Consultants, into the top private educational consultancy in Connecticut, Daryl developed deep expertise in motivating students to care about academic success. That work led to Motivate Your Son, a best-selling guide for parents seeking to shift their teenage sons' academic motivation. Daryl's experience guiding students to college and graduate school led to his second company, Career Counseling Connecticut. This work led to the creation of Career Path of Abundance and now The Parents' Guide to Career Planning for Your Twentysomething. Daryl's own path from Ivy-league lawyer to education-entrepreneur stemmed from following his desire to find work that was both meaningful and practical. This background creates the most significant writing differentiation with other authors of career books. Specifically, most career guidance authors have not worked with clients directly. Instead, they write about their own path and encourage others to follow their course. Such books can be inspirational. The challenge, however, is whether the author's life circumstances and abilities match up well enough with the reader's in order to provide the correct model to follow. Much like clients who come to Daryl after having experienced frustration with other career counselors who spoke in generalities about "finding your passion" and "doing what you love" but who could not help craft a practical plan for doing either, readers of Career Path of Abundance have expressed delight that they could apply the book's principles to their own lives. Daryl graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Georgetown University, where he graduated number one in his concentration and was named the Outstanding Student in his department. Daryl earned a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was named to Who's Who in American Law Students, and an M.G.A. Penn's Fels School. Daryl also earned a prestigious Equal Justice Foundation Fellowship, for which he served at The Brookings Institute, the nation's top think tank. After Penn Law, Daryl was appointed an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia where he worked on high profile homicide appeals. Thereafter, Daryl moved to Washington, DC and served the United States as an enforcement attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission and led the investigation into one of the largest financial frauds in history. After serving as an associate with one of the nation's largest law firms, Daryl became Vice-President and General Counsel for Mindgrow, an A@E Television funded new education company. Recently named to Who's Who In America, Daryl has been interviewed in national and local media and is a featured speaker on education issues. In addition to running The Learning Consultants, Daryl is a professor of Constitutional Law, Ethics in International Relations, and several other college courses related to law and government. Daryl lives in Old Saybrook, Connecticut with his wife and three children.