Originally Published in The Quad-City Times, August 1, 2026
Written by Cesar Toscano
A book on career exploration, written by a group of Pleasant Valley school counselors, will be coming out this August. “The Career Compass: Guiding Adolescents to Their Futures” was written by Pleasant Valley High School counselors Leslie Spiller, Ellie Curtis, Scott Rice, Nicole Shea and Ellie Thomas.
The intention of the book is to provide some guidance to educators who want to provide career development but may not have the knowledge or experience to do so.
The book provides inexpensive lesson plans, tailored to middle and high school educators’ resources and needs.
“It is available for you to tailor as needed for those students, but it really would be an educator saying, ‘our students need to be better prepared to figure out what they want to do.’ This would be a tool for them to use,” Spiller said.
The authors are hoping this book can provide those tools to students so they can find a career that fits their passions, she said.
“So, it really is developing, looking at what are the skills that they have, what are the passions they have, and what are the values they have, and taking some time to explore that, and then in turn taking all that information that they’ve learned, then pick careers that they feel like they fit, and then start researching those to continue to look at how that would fit,” Spiller said.
Students typically follow similar patterns when it comes to career planning. It can be following in their parents’ footsteps, what careers they interact with on a daily basis or what they see on social media or TV.
“That’s such a small part of that world,” Spiller said. “And so, it’s important for them to not only realize that there’s more careers out there, but also what things about them or the parts about them can fit with another career that they haven’t even thought about or realized that was a good fit for them.”
How this could help other counselors:
The authors also want the book to help counselors, who are usually working with a large segment of the school population. Nationally, 75% of school counselors are responsible for more than 251 students, according to a report by the American School Counselor Association.
The association’s recommended ratio for students to counselors is 250:1. The group wants their book to ease the workload of counselors by providing teachers and other educators with more training on career readiness, especially in schools that are short-staffed.
“I’m always going to say hire more people, fund schools because that is the best way to make an impact,” Spiller said. “But if you’re dealing with a difficult time of wanting to get this done, our book could provide those resources for anybody to pick up and be able to provide to their students.”
How the book came together:
The authors said the book came together for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was that data showed students were not achieving career milestones. The Pleasant Valley High counselors noticed that the district was falling short of state-mandated goals, primarily the percentage of students who have a credential six years after graduation.
The group tried to figure out why students were not receiving or pursuing those credentials and which groups of students were more unlikely to get those credentials. They started wondering if it was because students felt pressured to attend university or follow their friends to school.
“What if we could get this information in front of the students? We were working really hard as school counselors to push in and talk to our students as much as possible, but there’s a lot of students at our high school and there’s only five school counselors, and so it’s challenging to get to everyone, and that led to us proposing basically a tier one curriculum for our high school students,” Thomas said.
This led to the counselors developing a career and career readiness curriculum, which became the foundation for the book.
But this wasn’t always supposed to be a book, the group said. A retired counselor named Gay Dunn came in to provide help when one of the authors, Curtis, went on maternity leave. After seeing the curriculum in action, Dunn asked if they would want to write a book for her friend, who is a publisher at Research Press.
The group was reluctant for some time since they had never written a book, but decided to “take a leap of faith.”
For more information and to order the book, please check out The Career Compass product page.