DISCOVER for the Internet: Career Counseling to Go

The Internet version of DISCOVER offers a wealth of career-planning information.

DISCOVER is a comprehensive developmental guidance system that helps individuals identify their strengths and needs, and build a plan based on their personal profiles.

For more than 20 years, this disk-based system has offered research-based assessments of career-relevant interests, abilities, and job values to help students consider courses of study and career options that are good matches.

Now, new Internet versions—one for ninth graders through adults and another for middle schoolers—are taking career counseling into a new era.

 
DISCOVER for Middle Schools introduces younger students to career planning.

Students get a “token”—a user ID and password—that provides access to the program and lets them work independently through inventories of their interests, abilities, and values, from anywhere they have Internet access. They can save their information in a personal portfolio to return to later. Fear’s high school juniors love it.

“They want to know why we didn’t have this freshman year,” he said.

One of those students is sixteen-year-old Emily Gregg. “I have always been interested in teaching, until about a month ago,” she said. That’s when she first used DISCOVER. “It kind of opened my eyes to a lot of majors that are out there that I didn’t know about. That’s where I first heard about pediatric physical therapy.” That new option appeals to the Perrysburg junior even more than teaching, she said.

Internet access with the new versions of DISCOVER allows students to involve others in their career explorations.

“I just had a student stop in here and say, ‘Thank you so much for giving me that token. My parents and I are so happy,’” said Fear. “We’ve used DISCOVER in our office for five or six years, and parents have always had the opportunity to come in and use it on the server here, but how many can do that?”

Like all of DISCOVER, the new versions are based on extensive psychometric research and a comprehensive development guidance model.

Students complete inventories that help them narrow their career choices. They explore occupations that are good matches for them, as well as details of the training those occupations require. Internship, apprenticeship, and military options are included along with information on colleges and majors. Students can create personal portfolios to save information about their inventories, occupation choices, and the programs that interest them.

For students, the new Internet versions offer flexibility—they are available twenty-four hours a day, from any computer with Internet access. They also offer an opportunity to involve parents, guardians, or other family members in career explorations.

Emily Gregg has worked through DISCOVER with her parents, her friends, even her older brother, who is already in college.

“My brother said he never knew about the program when he was in school. He said it would have been really helpful to him,” Gregg said.

For schools, the Internet versions are more affordable than their disk-delivered counterparts. Because they are not loaded on the school’s servers, they require little technical support at the school. ACT offers customer service around the clock via phone or e-mail.

The new DISCOVER versions also can be customized. The middle school version, for example, can help students begin charting a course through high school. A particular high school’s courses can be built into DISCOVER for Middle Schools. In planning for high school, the middle schoolers can choose courses that fit the results of their interest inventories from a list of the courses actually offered at the high school they will attend.

“DISCOVER can connect students with career information that is individually appropriate for them,” said Gene Knutson, director of marketing for elementary and secondary programs. DISCOVER’s developers plan to expand upon that ability. “Among other enhancements, we will be adding the capability for schools to include their logos and local information, so students will have a very personalized experience.”

Even without those perks, schools like the new versions of DISCOVER. In the first four months that DISCOVER for the Internet was available, 1,100 sites were using it. An additional 400 had licensed DISCOVER for Middle Schools. Of schools that have been using the disk-delivered version, 36 percent already have converted to Internet versions. Perrysburg High School maintains the hard-drive version for staff members to use in classes, and provides DISCOVER for the Internet to students.

“The kids say this is fun,” Fear said. “There’s just so much stuff it can do. You can’t mess it up, and it’s so user friendly, it’s idiot proof.”

For more information on DISCOVER, or to sign up for a free 30-day trial of either of the new Internet-delivered versions, call 800/498-6068 or send an email to discover@act.org