The Mississippi Top Jobs Explorer Is Back, With a New Guide for Your Career Conversations 

The Mississippi Top Jobs Explorer Is Back, With a New Guide for Your Career Conversations 

When a seventh grader says they want to “work with computers” or a ninth grader isn’t sure what they want to do, what comes next? For many educators, the hardest part of early career exploration is turning a student’s interests into real, picture options right here in Mississippi. 

That’s why we’re excited to relaunch the Mississippi Top Jobs Explorer Tool on the Get2College website, now with updated data. Alongside it, we’re introducing the Jobs Explorer Companion Guide, a free resource for teachers, counselors, career coaches, and college access professionals who work with students early in their career search, in middle school and the first years of high school. Together, they give you what you need for a meaningful career conversation: reliable Mississippi data and a simple structure to guide the talk. 

What’s New in the Mississippi Top Jobs Explorer 

The Mississippi Top Jobs Explorer Tool lets students explore more than 500 Mississippi careers and see what each one really looks like here at home. The refreshed tool includes updated data collected and analyzed by Ithaka S&R from 2026, so the numbers you share with students reflect today’s Mississippi job market. 

For each career, students can see: 

• Average annual wage: what workers in that job typically earn in Mississippi 

• Projected growth: how much the job is expected to grow from 2022 to 2032 

• Annual job openings: how many positions open up each year, from new jobs and from workers leaving the field 

• Typical education: the level of education or training most often needed, from a high school diploma or certificate to a bachelor’s degree and beyond 

You and your students can narrow the options with filters for career cluster, industry, education level, geographic region, and a family-sustaining wage threshold. That last filter is a powerful conversation starter: it helps students see which careers can support a household in Mississippi, and what it takes to get there. 

Meet the NEW Jobs Explorer Companion Guide 

Data is a great starting point, but students need a conversation to make sense of it. The Companion Guide gives you that conversation in an easy, printable format. It isn’t meant to find the “best” career for a student. Instead, it helps students explore options, compare occupations, and consider how different careers fit their interests and post-high-school plans. 

Inside the guide, you’ll find: 

• A simple four-step approach: start with the student, explore the tool together, compare occupations, and keep exploring. 

• “Understanding the Numbers”: plain-language explanations of wages, growth, openings, and education, so students know what they’re looking at. 

• Questions to explore with students, such as “What kinds of problems do you enjoy solving?” and “Do you prefer working with people, technology, or your hands?” 

• Four high-opportunity career clusters in Mississippi: Digital Technology, Healthcare & Human Services, Advanced Manufacturing, and Management & Entrepreneurship. Each includes four example careers with wages, growth, openings, and typical education side by side. 

• A one-page student worksheet you can photocopy, where students record two or three careers that caught their attention, reflect on what they found, and choose a next step. 

The featured careers cover a wide range of paths, from welders and industrial machinery mechanics who can start with a high school diploma or certificate to respiratory therapists with an associate degree and software developers with a bachelor’s. That range matters. At Get2College, we think of college as any education beyond high school that leads to financial stability, whether that’s a four-year degree, a two-year community college degree, or a certificate in career and technical education. 

Ways to Put Them to Work 

The tool and the guide were designed for one-on-one career conversations, and they work just as well in other settings: 

• College & Career Readiness classes: Have students take an interest survey, then use the Top Jobs Explorer to find two or three matching careers and complete the worksheet. 

• Counseling sessions: Use the questions in the guide to open the conversation, then explore the tool together on screen. 

• Career coaching and advisory periods: Pick one career cluster a week and compare its featured careers as a group. Which pays most? Which has the most openings? What education does each take? 

• Middle school exploration: Keep it light. The goal isn’t to choose a career; it’s to discover a few possibilities and spark curiosity. 

• Schoolwide events: Use the cluster pages at career days or family nights to show what’s possible in Mississippi. 

No matter the setting, the message to students stays the same: you don’t need to find the “right” career today. Each conversation is a step forward. 

Get Started Today 

1. Explore the tool: Visit the Mississippi Top Jobs Explorer on the Get2College Career Planning page. 

1. Download the guide: Get your free copy of the Jobs Explorer Companion Guide. 

1. Bring us in: Get2College offers free training and support for educators. Book a training at get2college.org/professional-development or email training@get2college.org.  

Every student deserves to see a future for themselves in Mississippi. We believe in your students, and we’re here to help you help them take the next step. 

Get2College is a program of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation that provides free, practical support to help Mississippians plan, prepare, and pay for college. Learn more at www.get2college.org.