Review: ACT Advantage Discover

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Remember the high school guidance counselor’s office?  The only thing I really remember about it is going in there to look the yearbooks from some of the area colleges.  That may or may not have been because an older guy on whom I had a crush was in one of said yearbooks.  I’ll never tell.  I don’t really remember ever getting any especially good guidance from the counselor, though.

ACT Advantage offers kids some much more personalized guidance on their college and career choices.  The offerings from ACT Advantage are three-fold:  Explore, Plan, and Discover.  I’ll be posting more about the Explore and Plan options in a subsequent review.  Today, I’ll be focusing on Discover, which is an online, student-directed planning tool.

With Discover, your student can take three different surveys to help determine their abilities, their interests, and their values.  Brianna really enjoyed taking the surveys.  I think she’s a lot like me in that we like quizzes that help us discover or confirm things that we suspect about ourselves.  The surveys give a statement and you click buttons to indicate how true that statement is for yourself.

Once the surveys are completed, you can view a summary of career fields and specific jobs within those fields for which your results have shown a strong aptitude, interest, or value.  Then you can look at a keyed chart that will show you which career paths might be of interest based on each of the three surveys with the hope being that your student will find something intriguing in a field shown to be high in all three categories — interest, ability and values.

Brianna and I found the program interesting.  It suggested some career paths she never would have considered.  Of course, they weren’t anything that seemed to really interest her either, but she is just 14.

In addition to the surveys, you can learn more about the specific job suggestions — what type of work is done by a person with that job, the type of education required (college degree, graduate work, etc.), and the type of pay that can be expected.  You can also explore colleges offering degrees in the programs that interest your student.

To quote the email that Crew members received about ACT Advantage, Discover will enable a student to:

  • Identify his or her strengths and needs with an assessment of interests, abilities and job values
  • Build a plan based on her personal profile
  • Explore occupations, majors and schools
  • Build an education plan that relates to career plans
  • Improve job-seeking skills and develop a resume.

The home version is available as a 3-month license for $19.95 and 6-month license for $24.95.  Additionally,  ACT Advantage offers a free curriculum guide with your purchased Discover license to help students get the most out of the college and career planning process.

While Brianna thought that the surveys were kind of fun, I’m not sure that I felt that we got $20 worth of use from it, but that very well may be because Brianna is still young and doesn’t have a good idea of what career fields interest her.  I would definitely consider revisiting the site in a couple of years because it did bring up career paths that we would have never considered for her and which might prove to be of interest to her. 

I received this product free for the purpose of reviewing it.  I received no other compensation for this review.  The opinions expressed in this review are my personal, honest opinions.  Actual results may vary.

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Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.

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