Career Exploration Helps Students Make Informed Decisions And Plans For Their Future
According to Sareena Hopkins, Executive Director at Canadian Career Development Foundation, an informed decision is based on self-awareness and opportunity awareness. So, to make an informed decision, students must learn about themselves and the different options available to them. And this is precisely where career exploration comes into play. Career exploration is the vehicle for building opportunity awareness. Active career exploration does more than simply list a number of post-secondary pathways available to students. Instead, it allows students to discover the skills, knowledge, and values involved in different jobs. Through exploring occupations, students gain relevant knowledge concerning job responsibilities, work environment, training requirements, remuneration, and more. As a result, they are equipped to make informed decisions.
Find Your Future: Virtual Career Exploration Activities
Not sure what career youre interested in? There are tons to choose from, so it can be difficult to even decide on a few options to look into! A few months ago, we posted about some great career exploration tools, like exploring Indiana Career Explorer and Indiana Career Ready. And dont forgetyour family, school counselors and teachers can be great resources, too. Just because you arent seeing your teachers and school counselors face-to-face right now doesnt mean they arent available for help, guidance and support.
Lets take a look some other activities you can do at home to start thinking about the future you want.
1. Narrow your focus: Try to narrow down your interests to 2-3 different career clusters. Career clusters are a group of careers that all fit into some same category like STEM, IT or Manufacturing. Think about classes you like at school, career clusters that align with your personal interests, and more. We have a list of questions that can help you get started here. When I was in high school, I loved classes like English, sociology and world civilizations. In short, I loved reading and writing and I loved learning about how groups of people interact. Career clusters like Arts and Communications Education and Training lined up with my interests.
- Extrovert or Introvert
- Feeler or Thinker
- Judger or Perceiver
Why Middle School Is The Perfect Time For Students To Explore Careers
Middle school is the ideal time to introduce your students to career exploration for three main reasons. First, middle school students want to engage in career exploration. Second, middle school students benefit more from career intervention than their high school peers. Third, in high school, students are choosing courses that form their educational pathway and determine their post-secondary opportunities.
Because career exploration is a continual process, there arebenefitsto bringing it into the classroom well before high school and it should be worked into all subject areas. Research shows that higher levels of career planfulness can result in heightened school engagement. Highlighting future career relevancy can also help to answer the age-old question, When will I ever use this stuff?! In a world where the average worker will have five to sevendifferent careers during their lifetime, it is valuable to practice career exploration as an ongoing activity. So lets take a look at exactly how we can get our students engaged in this exploratory process.
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Write Down Your Work Achievements
If you’ve exceeded the goals set forth by your management team or otherwise made an impact in the workplace, make sure to write down those details. You can include these achievements on your resume or use them as talking points during important conversations or interviews about your next career steps.
Career Exploration Can Help Cultivate Hope In Students
Hopecan be defined as the cognitive combination of agency and pathways. In other words, hope is where goal-directed determination and the planning of ways to meet goals intersect. Thats because knowing what our goal is, believing we can achieve it, and having a plan to achieve it shows us that our goal is attainable. And thats precisely what career exploration does for students. Not every student who dreams of travelling to the moon is going to become an astronaut, but career exploration shows them that there is a path that leads to that outcome. It may be hard. It may not be the right fit for the student. They may even discover something better for them along the way. The beauty of career exploration is that it can help students feel more confident as they begin their post-secondary education. And if they do discover their original goal isnt right for them, they can pursue a new interest and set a different goal.
Interested in finding a way to help foster hope in your students? Check out ChatterHighs gamified platform that uses inquiry-based learning to expose students to a variety of career and post-secondary options. ChatterHighs approach has beenproven to produce a wide range of positive outcomes, including making students feel more hopeful about their future. Ready to start exploring? Create your account now orbook a demo.
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Fun Career Activities To Engage Your High School Students
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How many times do we skip over the career development aspect of our roles as high school counselors because it seems too tedious, or we feel like we dont have the time to do career activities? When we find time to work with our high school students around careers, we want to make sure what were doing is effective and meaningful.
Maybe youve hosted a large scale career fair before? Maybe it was in-person or maybe it was virtual! Im sure either one was an AMAZING opportunity for all of your students! Lets think more about what made an event like that engaging and take that down to a smaller level within your school!
The right career activity can make ALL the difference! How do you make careers interesting and fun? Make them relatable! Make them engaging! Get students involved by having them ask and answer questions. The more they can practice, the more confident they will become with career exploration, career readiness, and career development!
Here are 4 fun career activities that you can incorporate into your individual counseling, your classroom lessons, or your small group lessons to engage your high school students around careers!
Use Virtual Reality To Explore Career Options
Hands-on, interactive, and dynamic experiences are important to engage students and give them a realistic window into what a career will entail. Some of the most innovative work in career exploration is utilizing virtual reality to provide immersive experiences for students to do jobs. Though internships, apprenticeships, and other immersive, real-world experiences are only possible for a small number of students, VR can provide access to the environments, tools, and opportunities in a wide variety of industries without leaving the classroom.
- Oculus VR Career Experience: This free resource designed for the Oculus Go platform, the most popular consumer VR headset, provides students with the opportunity to learn the complex world of pipe fitting, HVAC, and welding. The application was designed by the International Training Fund of the United Association, an international union of plumbers, fitters, and technicians, to provide students with an immersive and realistic window into these jobs.
- : ByteSpeed, available for a fee, provides students ranging from elementary school to higher education a wide variety of career VR experiences including agriculture, fashion design, health care, and engineering.
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Eliminate The Careers That Don’t Appeal To You
During your research, you may find that some career paths aren’t in your best interest. For example, some may require more education than you currently have or have the desire to get, some may pay less than you want to make and others may not have a great job outlook, which can mean job insecurity later on. While going through this step, be as picky as you need so you end up with a handful of career options that seem like viable choices.
Career Activities For Middle School Students
June 23, 2022// by Shelley Uselman
If the question “what do you want to be when you grow up” leads to blank stares, then you’re in the right place! Middle school students are just beginning to recognize that they have a place in the world. Help them explore their potential through fun career activities!
These 20 middle school activities will help your students develop their own identities as they explore career choices. Many of the jobs they will have in the future are in fields that don’t yet exist make sure to focus on building essential skills alongside career research.
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Relevant And Productive Career Exploration For All Students
As you develop and plan your career exploration activities, take time to regularly survey students for fields they would like to explore, the kinds of activities that resonate with them, and for feedback on past activities and events. By aligning career exploration activities with student interest and choice, it is much more likely that students will engage more deeply and reflectively.
When students do this, they are able to see connections between future career goals and their current learning they are able to figure out the kinds of work they enjoy and those they do not and, they are able to understand how their strengths and preferences map onto future possibilities. By deeply exploring career possibilities during secondary school and critically thinking about the associated realities, students are able to enter postsecondary life knowing they are making active and well-informed choices. Ultimately, if students are excited about these activities and thoughtfully engage with them, they are better prepared for the entire pathway to a career.
Centralizing career exploration activities in the same place as goal setting, college exploration and graduation plans can help students see the little, and big pictures. Check out how SchooLinks can consolidate it all for your district.
Include A Diversity Of Voices
Students are more likely to deeply engage with career exploration activities when they can personally relate to or see themselves in career role models. It is vital that schools offer students exposure to a wide diversity of individuals representing possible career pathways. Expanding conceptions of role models for students both opens the minds of current students and works to upend historical stereotypes and barriers long-term.
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Career Exploration Helps Students Evaluate Career Pathways According To Their Values Skills And Interests
Since career exploration involves exploring the environment and the self, it requires students to reflect on themselves and the variety of job opportunities theyve discovered. Since this exploration is not simply a mental exercise but requires hands-on experience, students will be able to test their hypotheses. That is, students can try out their career of choice through job shadowing, work or volunteer experience, or developing a new hobby. Then they can decide whether this career pathway is truly compatible with their values, skills, and interests. Considering the role that intrinsic motivation plays injob satisfaction, its important that we help students discover careers that interest them and allow them to use their skills. And career exploration is one key way we can do this.
Career Exploration Exposes Students To The Myriad Of Career Pathways That Exist
Did you know that the Standard Occupational Classification includes 867detailed occupations? Or that Canadas National Occupational Classification lists approximately 30,000different job titles? That said, neither the SOC nor the NOC attempt to provide anexhaustive list of job titles. Instead, these lists aim to cover the most commonly used and universally understood labels that identify work in their respective labor markets. In other words, a list of 30,000 occupations does not cover all the jobs that exist in a single country. Given the tremendous number of job titles and opportunities, it is impossible for students to be aware of all their options without dedicating time and attention to career exploration.
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What Are Some Career Exploration Tools
Gone are the days when educators and counselors have to rely on outdated worksheets that have been circulating since the 1980s. Todays career exploration tools include sophisticated EdTech programs and creative ideas to engage learners of all ages.
- Xello: College and career readiness software that helps students build self-knowledge, personalized future readiness plans and critical life skills.
- WeTeachNYC: An online education community with a free unit on career exploration
- Bizworld.org: Career Exploration Lesson Plan for Grades 3-5 and 6-8.
- Boys & Girls Clubs of Canada: Learning and career development programs
Adult Basic Education And English Language Learners
Adult Basic Education Adult Basic Education programs serve students ages 16 and over who are not enrolled in school and who want to improve their basic skills in reading, writing, math, listening, and speaking. Learn about different types of Adult Basic Education or use the Provider List to find ABE classes near you. You can also contact the adult literacy hotline by phone or text to get more help.
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Why Is Career Exploration Important For Students
Every good explorer starts a journey with a map. Conditions may cause them to alter their plans and they may learn new information that leads them to change directions, but having a guiding force is a helpful way to create and retain a strong sense of purpose throughout every adventure.When we make career exploration part of the framework for every students education, they learn to think beyond the days math test or history lessonand connect the dots between what they are learning and how they might apply it in the future. This often leads to improved engagement, higher achievement levels, reduced absenteeism, and increased graduation rates.When students have a good understanding of the working world, they can imagine how they might fit into it someday. They can prepare for the kind of career they want by setting goals, choosing courses, and focusing on extracurricular activities that support their future.Best of all, students who participate in career exploration activities often develop a stronger sense of self-esteem and self-knowledge. They naturally begin to build social-emotional learning skills such as organization, communication, problem-solving, and even financial literacy because theyre focused on achieving a goal.
Career Day At Pixie Academy
While targeting elementary grades, this reading activity does a fantastic job of exploring how we can individually contribute to our community through the variety of jobs we have. This activity would work for 6th grade, or older middle school students could be paired with younger students.
Learn more: Common Lit
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What Are Career Exploration Activities
Career exploration activities refer to fun programming that introduces kids to a wide variety of occupations. These programs typically focus on elementary and middle school children, as high school students usually explore careers through more in-depth work-based learning. Career exploration is an important step in helping students learn about multiple career options, and these fun activities help students identify their unique interests, talents and skills.
Though career exploration activities usually take place in the classroom, students can also engage at home or in their community.
Related:
Top 5 Career Awareness Activities For Middle School Students
Career awareness is an essential first step in building students understanding of the working world.
Career awareness differentiates itself from career exploration and career clarity by introducing students to different job opportunities in the world.
It shows them options for their futures in a huge scope with the hope that each student will find a career that resonates with them in terms of interests, purpose, and inspiration.
Thats a tall order for a middle school class, which is why career awareness activities are so hard to find and even harder to apply to middle school students.
With that in mind, you have a few options at your disposal to help you out!
The five best career awareness activity ideas for middle school are:
In this post, we’ll dive into the details of each activity and give you some extra ideas for career exploration.
You’ll also find a ready-to-use career exploration activity you can implement in your classroom right now!
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Career Planning Is A Process For:
- Identifying what you are good at
- Knowing how your skills, talents, values, and interests translate into possible jobs or careers
- Matching your skills, etc. to existing jobs or careers
- Matching your career goals to your financial needs
- Matching your career goals to your educational needs
- Making good decisions for yourself
- Finding ways to meet your educational and financial needs on your schedule
It is important to understand how your individual cultural context influences your worldview. Each of us has an individual worldview composing our attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs about how things work in the world. Your Cultural Context surrounds the entire career planning process, and includes your cultural heritage and life experiences.
The Career Planning Process
EACH OF US POSSESSES A TOTAL OF WELL OVER 500 INDIVIDUAL SKILLS.
STEP 1: Self-Assessment
What you will do for a living depends a lot on who you are. This may sound obvious, but many people neglect considering this important side of selecting a career. You can avoid joining the ranks of people who are dissatisfied with their work by making a conscious effort to assess yourself. There is no way you can be absolutely certain that a career will meet all of your needs, but there are things you can do very easily that will help you learn more about who you are. Once mastered, techniques of self-assessment can be repeated throughout your life.
What is self-assessment? Essentially, it is a way to enhance self-understanding. It is being able to describe your unique characteristics clearly and accurately regarding what you do well , what is important to you , and what you like to do .
Since there is no better source of information about you than yourself, the easiest method of increasing self-understanding is to review and analyze your past and present experiences with a career counselor. Increasing your knowledge of your skills, values and interests will help determine the type of work which fits you best.
IN EMPLOYMENT SETTINGS, VALUESPROVIDE THE EMOTIONAL SALARY OF WORK.
STEP 2: Career Exploration
AS YOU LOCATE RELEVANT CAREER MATERIALS, KEEP THOROUGH NOTES ON WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED AND WHERE YOU FOUND THE INFORMATION.
STEP 3: Targeting
STEP 4: Career Preparation
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