“Remember, if you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” – Reverend H.K. Williams
You know Your Survival Guy is a big fan of having a plan. Prior Planning, as my mother, a schoolteacher, would say. Knowing what you want to do is the first step toward achieving your goal.
“What do you want to do with your life?” That’s the question advisors from Byron Trott’s rootEd Alliance are asking high schoolers across America, urging them to have a “Plan A and a Plan B.” The alliance embeds advisors in schools who can pick up the slack where busy guidance counselors are falling behind. The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Weber reports:
The model is “so simple it’s almost embarrassing we didn’t think of it ourselves,” said Hal Higdon, the chancellor of Ozarks Technical Community College System, rootEd’s primary partner in Missouri.
Advisers are agnostic on whether students choose college, military service, employment or trade school. The goal is for each senior to have a Plan A and ideally a Plan B. To get there, advisers organize visits to employers, pile students into vans for college tours and keep lists of local scholarships.
Most important, they say, they push students to think about the future.
The rootEd Alliance website explains its advising model as follows:
rootEd advisors work one-on-one with rural high school seniors to help them explore careers, find the right college or technical training programs, complete applications, and access financial aid, whether a student is pursuing community college, a four-year university, technical training, an apprenticeship, or military service.
Working alongside school counselors, rootEd advisors are there for their students every step of the way to ensure they graduate with a clear plan for career success.
How RootEd Advisors Support Students
- Match students with career opportunities through internships, job shadowing, training programs, and part-time work experience.
- Help students apply to best-fit college, career training, and apprenticeships with application support and interview prep.
- Help students identify and apply for financial resources, including scholarships and financial aid application support
- Support the transition to college and career by helping navigate housing, transportation, and other logistics
Action Line: Giving kids a plan empowers them to act, and beating inertia is the most difficult part of achieving any goal. Investing is the same way. Once you have a plan, you break inertia and begin progress toward your goals. When you want a plan, email me at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com. And click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
