Listen to Career Book 3: Tips for
High School Students with Cerebral Palsy

Listen to Career Book 3. It's an audiobook which summarizes the track you can take as a parent in effectively coaching your high school student who has cerebral palsy (CP) or other special needs.

Career Book 3: Confidence booster

Here's why you need to download this audiobook of strategies for high school students. It shows how leveraging disability worked for me in the mainstream job market -- even though I walked and talked with difficulty due to CP. 

For me, this audiobook's 15 career-readiness strategies were confidence boosters because, together, they provided me with a quick career readiness assessment.

Listen to Career Book 3. It only takes a little more than two hours. In this easy-to-follow guidebook, you get:

• Expert advice
• Potential pathways
• Mainstream orientation

Now is the time to help your high school student with special needs tap disability's advantage in today's job market.

The steps you take now will help your youngster build a meaningful career. Why wait until it's too late?

15 strategies for mentoring a high school student

During the 1980s, I didn’t have an opportunity to tell my mom about what I had learned about developing a career as an individual with a disability.

These are the time-tested strategies which now, decades later, may help you provide a career readiness assessment for your own youngster.

Growing in Self-confidence

Strategy 1 - Develop Emotional Intelligence
Strategy 2 - Collect Resume Writing Tips
Strategy 3 - Become Familiar with Today’s Work Options
Strategy 4 - Realize Disability Is Becoming Irrelevant
Strategy 5 - Explore Post-secondary Options
Strategy 6 - Know How to Set Goals

Discovering Disability’s Competitive Advantage

Strategy 7 - Learn How to Diffuse Stress
Strategy 8 - Develop Problem-solving Skills
Strategy 9 – Play the “Exception” Trump Card
Strategy 10 - Identify a Team Role That Has the Right Fit
Strategy 11 - Follow a Plan for Maintaining Motivation
Strategy 12 - Use Career Clusters to Guide Career Planning
Strategy 13 - Understand Ingrained False Assumptions
Strategy 14 - Know ADA’s Basic Provisions
Strategy 15 - Develop a Strategy for Disclosing Disability

Based on National Career Development Guidelines

Each of these 15 strategies are based on the road map recommended by National Career Development Guidelines (NCDG) and my experience as a Global Career Development Facilitator and as a person with special needs and mainstream work experience.

Listen to Career Book 3.

Excerpt from strategy 9

... Your high school student is in a unique position to change perception one person at a time. You can help him or her prepare for the role of an educator during job searches.

The task is to show prospective hiring managers he or she does not fit their preconceived notions of a person with a disability -- that your mentee is indeed the “exception” to sometimes long-held beliefs.

That means your youngster must begin to actively position him or herself as the exception to those misconceptions, which are usually based on lack of knowledge. Those false impressions may have roots in misunderstandings picked up during the hiring manager’s childhood. They have never been challenged in the hiring manager’s mind -- until the individual you’re mentoring appears as a job candidate.

Here’s the good news. Getting hired is not crucial at this point. As a career coach, you have time to counsel your high school student, and he or she has time to learn these basic problem-solving strategies for addressing misconceptions about disability.

Since misconceptions usually stem from lack of information, you have an opportunity to counsel your high school student in showing he or she doesn’t fit the hiring manager’s preconceived notions. That tends to “unfreeze” job interview situations so your “now-grown-up kid” can go on to explain why he or she is the best candidate for the job at hand ...

Written by Jim Hasse

Jim Hasse, a Global Career Development Facilitator who has CP, summarizes the essential career development strategies to follow for career coaching your high school youngster with special needs.

In Career Book 3, he outlines six strategies for helping your youngster grow in self-confidence and nine strategies for discovering disability’s competitive edge in tomorrow’s job market.

He has 29 years of corporate experience (10 of them as Vice President for Corporate Communication at Foremost Farms USA). He’s an Accredited Business Communicator, owner of Hasse Communication Counseling, LLC, and founder of cerebral-palsy-career-builders.com. He and his wife, Pam, live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Chris Chappell, a C6-7 Quadriplegic, is a dedicated disability advocate.

From peer mentoring, career counseling, life-coaching and legislative crusading, Chris has been on the front lines of SCI (Spinal Cord Injury/Paralysis) advocacy for more than 15 years.

In addition to his corporate career as Vice President of Investments at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Graduate Relations Coordinator at Craig Hospital, Chris has a successful commercial Voiceover and Audiobook narration business (Dublot, LLC). Chris and his family reside in Littleton, Colorado.

What others are saying about Career Book 3

• “A quick but essential summary of the competencies needed to make the transition from school to integrated employment.”

Jessica Kleist, MS. Ed., LPC-IT, Professional Counselor in Training and owner of Abilities First Counseling & Empowerment Services, LLC.

• “A great resource for parents to assist a high school youngster along the path to be the best that he/she can be.”

Mary J. Krohn, grandparent of youngster with special needs.

Listen to Career Book 3

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