Challenging as it may be to meet the needs of gifted learners, it can be even more worrisome to contemplate what life might be like for him or her once grown. A common concern of the parents and educators of gifted learners is what the future might hold for them, especially if he or she is intensely sensitive. Have they been properly prepared, and how might they best use their gifts? How will they and their sensitivities adjust to a world in which they must fully advocate for themselves, and how might they operate in a traditional job environment?
Fortunately, the current generation of gifted learners will have many options when it comes to their future careers. In addition, preparing them with a healthy self-confidence at any age will be of great assistance when they are launched into the market.
Work on Soft Job Skills
Soft job skills are abilities which usually aren’t listed on a resume. They can be attained in volunteer work or entry-level jobs, and generally prepare the employee for positions of greater responsibility and complexity. They are transferrable across all fields and levels of employment.
Soft job skills include negotiation, patience in working with customers, collaborative problem solving, effectively interpreting body language, and critical thinking. They can also consist of basic abilities such as working with a time card, following directions, interpreting a schedule, arriving on time, working in a team, and meeting expectations which are applicable to all.
If some of these sound like a nightmare for your gifted child, bear in mind that there’s plenty of time and space between school years and the job market. Asynchronous development, which is the variation many gifted children experience between intellectual and emotional or social skills, may alarm some parents. However, there are plenty of ways to gently encourage exceptional children and prepare them for the workplace without overwhelming them.
Ensure Self-Worth Is Established Separately from Accomplishment
Since the majority of children have high engagement outside a traditional classroom structure, the highly gifted may become over-focused on academic achievement. Until recently, this was the sole measuring stick used for giftedness—how well a student tested or preformed in a classroom setting deemed him or her “exceptional.” Since many gifted students may struggle to connect with peers or must combat bullying, they might begin to focus their self-worth on measurable accomplishment.
This can help to foster healthy goal setting, but it can also cause a gifted child to concentrate on an outcome rather than process. Effective learning strategies focus less on reward and comparison and more on practical goal-setting and learning to adjust quickly. Having an external locus of identity, or overreliance on such attributes as accomplishments or wealth, begins in insecurity and can easily become a downward spiral of low self-esteem.
Encouraging a child to look instead at such qualities as kindness, patience, applying effort, resilience, and moral strength promotes an internal locus of identity and separates exterior achievement from self-worth. Finding the balance between wholesome ambition and over-reliance on trophies can be practiced in the gifted child’s everyday environment. For example, preparing diligently for the spelling bee and doing well while competing fairly is worthy of celebration; admonishing a child to win at all costs and withholding praise when he sits down on the first round is not preparing the student well for the workplace.
Many gifted children who are now grown speak of becoming solely identified with their gifts or intelligence, which can ironically become a burden and source of stress. Fearful of letting down parents, teachers, and mentors, some exceptional children bury their gifts or freeze up in performance or testing environments. Emphasizing a child’s effort, internal qualities, and life functions independent of giftedness can all help to support the complete development of an exceptional child. Independence, learning to work with others when necessary, and learning to help others are all important parts of developing a non-accomplishment obsessed life.
Practicing for the World Outside
Encouraging gifted children to participate in community projects, work with other exceptional children, take part in enrichment activities, and launch their own enterprises are all great tools for developing soft job skills. Not only will these translate to the classroom, they can also assist the child in preparation for operating on their own.
Such activities can mirror a child’s development, skill level, and giftedness. For example, a junior high student who is far advanced in coding can develop an app and, with parental supervision, work with clients or learn to respond to users. A child who is most at home with animals can volunteer at a shelter or volunteer to help train pre-adopted dogs—this demands working with a schedule and a supervisor. Writing prodigies are able to plan out and complete a novel, essay collection, or chapbook, which involves working with editing and publishing decisions. All of these can not only encourage the child in his or her gifts, but remind them of what awaits them beyond their formal schooling.
Working With Perfectionism in Gifted Learners
One hallmark of giftedness is a tendency towards perfectionism. While not all gifted children share this trait, especially if the struggle with double exceptionalism, it can be both a blessing and a stumbling block for gifted children, their caregivers, and their education team. It can slow a student’s ability to meet deadlines, foster procrastination, cause anxiety and stress, and interfere with realistic goal-setting.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of room for perfectionism as long as the child develops the ability to approach it in a healthy manner. Embracing high standards, readjusting as the situation demands to make the best of any environment, and ambitious objective formation are all highly valuable in a workplace. Children who grow into high-achieving adults have learned to properly channel these tendencies.
Good career goals for gifted children with harnessed perfectionism include the medical field, technology creation, aviation or aerospace, engineering, architecture, and the legal profession. All these fields and many more call for attention to detail and high reliance on self-direction.
