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By Dr. Leigh Anne Taylor Knight, Executive Director and COO of The DeBruce Foundation
November brings together two things I hold dear:
- As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m grateful for the people who have helped me find my way.
- During National Career Development Month, I think about how each of us can help someone else find theirs. Sometimes it starts with the next question we ask.
At The DeBruce Foundation, our recent national research on youth and careers in the age of AI found that 85% of young people surveyed were at least somewhat confident they’d achieve their career goals. However, only 11% had a very clear idea of what to do to prepare. That gap matters, especially when nearly six in ten say AI makes them nervous about their career prospects.
As adults, we can help young people build career literacy by helping them recognize their strengths, explore where those strengths could take them, and find people who can help them take the next step. Educators across the nation are doing this important work right now in their classrooms – and we have an incredible opportunity to continue these conversations at home.
In the kitchen, developing recipes… and people
I love to cook, and I love even more what cooking does for a room. Give people something to do together, and pretty soon they’re talking, connecting. I was reminded of that recently when my young neighbors came over to bake with me.
Think about all the skills that go into baking. Getting our ingredients ready is Organizing. Figuring out how much batter to put in each cup is Judging and Estimating. Checking whether something is ready to come out of the oven is Inspecting. And helping your younger sibling grow their skills? That’s Developing Others. At The DeBruce Foundation, we call these kinds of skills Agilities™. Once you have words for them, it’s easier to see how a skill you use in the kitchen could come in handy somewhere else.
And when you’re standing side by side at the counter, a question like “What part of this did you like best?” can feel easy to answer. I can share what I enjoy, too, and see where the conversation takes us.
Questions to ask each other at Thanksgiving
I hear from young people and people looking for work who dread the questions they expect at Thanksgiving. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and “Have you found a job yet?” usually come from a place of care. They can still feel like requests for a progress report, especially when someone is trying to figure out things. This Thanksgiving, I’d love for us to Change the Question. The DeBruce Foundation’s free Thanksgiving Conversation Guide has questions for young people and adults to ask each other. Here are two I’d like to try:
- Ask a young person, “What do your friends or family come to you for?
- Ask an adult, “Who is someone you met who changed your career for the better?”
I like the first question because a young person might realize that something they do all the time, like explaining a tricky assignment to a friend, is a skill others count on. And I love the second because it gives adults a chance to tell a story about someone who helped them along the way. That story might even lead to an introduction or give someone at the table a new idea to explore.
Whether you’re setting the table, stirring something on the stove, or taste-testing the desserts, download the free Thanksgiving Conversation Guide or open the cards on your phone. Pick a question you’d like to ask, and let someone else pick one for you. You may learn something new about a person you’ve known for years.
Happy Thanksgiving, and happy National Career Development Month!
