Career Readiness Curriculum For Adults

Review & Fill In The Gaps

Youre in the home stretch! The hard work is already done in the last six steps now you just need to review your drafted curriculum.

The key elements to review are:

• Your vision for the class
• Your goals throughout the class
• The lessons youve planned
• The resources require for those lessons
• Additional purchases you have to make
• Overall curriculum hours
• Standards from your state or school
• Aligning with your supervisors expectations

You can do all of this by going back over your curriculum on your own or contacting your supervisor, department head, or principal.

Then, once youre done, its time for the fun part.

Its time to teach!

But at the end of the day, all of this is almost exhausting, isnt it?

Wouldnt it be great if there were a shortcut to creating a career readiness curriculum for your classroom?

Well, youre in luck

What Is Career Readiness All About

Career readiness describes a persons ability to:

• Find a suitable job in any industry and at any level
• Understand the requirements and responsibilities of their role
• Be successful in reporting and relating to various stakeholders such as customers, colleagues, and management
• Grow professionally within their role

Since career readiness is all about preparing students for life after school, it must include both in-class instruction as well as internships, apprenticeships, or co-ops.

These outside-the-classroom opportunities encourage students to practice their newly acquired skills while picking up new real-world skills that just arent available in the classroom.

Career readiness skills, also known as transferable or employability skills, can often differentiate a good employee from a great one.

Transferable or employability skills provide students with a competitive edge during interviews and internships for current and future careers.

Unfortunately, schools havent always given these critical skills the priority that they should. This is surprising since career readiness can give students the edge they need to land jobs.

Additionally, with every state having a different standard for what career readiness should include, teaching this subject can often be challenging.

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Where We Are With Career Readiness Standards

Giving students a career education is a great way to help them develop the skills they need to evaluate potential career paths.

Indeed, career readiness has never been more importantnot since the following facts came to light:

What

• About one third of students require it upon entering college
• Not keeping pace with projected workforce needs
• Currently ranked 12th globally

Career readiness is such a major subject today that states themselves have taken the lead in developing and adopting rigorous standards.

These standards, known as the Common Core State Standards, are for English language arts and mathematics. They were developed in a partnership between the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

While the federal government hasnt been involved in the design of these standards, it does support the state-led movement to ensure that all students are held to high standards for learning and achievement.

Not all states, however, have adopted the Common Core. In fact, different states teach according to different standards. These standards may overlap from one state to the next, but no two states have the same career readiness standards.

Additionally, different states may require career readiness to be taught in different grades. As such, it is best you get in touch with your administrator to find out your states standards if you dont already know them.

Lastly, find out if you can incorporate the Positive Action program in your school.

S To Make A Career Readiness Curriculum

Career readiness curriculum is one of the most popular education requirements in the United States right now.

Interestingly, its also one of the most difficult to create!

This is because career readiness is one of the newest subject areas to have standards assigned to it.

As a result, a career readiness curriculum can change from state to state, county to county, and even school to school.

This is why its so important to know how to create your own career readiness curriculum. Even if youre lucky enough to have standards as a guideline, you still may have to create a full classroom syllabus from scratch!

So how do you do it?

To create a career readiness curriculum, you can break the entire concept down into seven actionable steps.

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Job Readiness Activities From Weareteachers

WeAreTeachers is another online community for educators. The site has a large lesson plan database with ideas for any age and subject area.

One article we found is called 9 Awesome Classroom Activities That Teach Job Readiness Skills.

Each workplace readiness skills activity focuses on specific subjects like communication and critical thinking.

The article gives a How To explaining how to run each activity in your classroom. The types of activities range from group-based to individual work by each student.

These activities would best be use as icebreaker introductions to the skills you plan to discuss.

No matter your teaching style, you are likely to find at least one idea here that will enhance your workplace readiness skills lessons!

Career Readiness: What It Is And Why You Need To Teach It

Career readiness provides students with a foundation from which they can demonstrate they have the necessary skills to broadly prepare them for success in the workplace.

It might seem obvious that students should receive an education that focuses on teaching them the skills required to succeed in real-world jobs.But unfortunately, as traditional education evolved with time, its focus shifted away from skill development and more towards theory.

This has created a gap in more evidence-based life skills curriculum and programs. These programs are geared towards helping students become aware of their natural abilities so its easier to set them up for success in life.

Students need to be prepared to compete in a world that demands more than just basic skills.

Because students face high expectations in the real world of college and careers, its important to ensure their success by aligning schools standards with the expectations theyll encounter later on.

Career-ready students will have the skills to compete in todays global, knowledge-based economyregardless of their race, socioeconomic status, or geographic location.

The bottom line is that school should be the place where students can begin to prepare and equip themselves with career readiness skills.

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What Do Our Students Learn

College & Career Readiness – free classes & tutoring

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• Orientation in person takes 15-20 minutes and is available 9:00am-3:00pmMonday-Friday.

Lessons From The United States Department Of Labor

The US Department of Labor has a great resource with soft skills lesson plans.

Soft Skills to Pay the Bills was specifically developed to teach workplace readiness skills to students ages 14-21.

The curriculum has activities and lessons for six specific skills:

Each skill consists of multiple lessons and activities you can download as a PDF, complete with everything you will need to plan and teach the lessons.

In the PDFs, each workplace readiness skills activity lists the amount of time it takes, the materials needed, and directions for facilitating. Having this information will be invaluable for planning your lessons!

The lesson plans are highly detailed but theyre missing assessments. If you want to give grades for any of the lessons, you will need to create your own quizzes and tests.

It may take you some time to create assessments and decide how you want to use the resources, but most of the work is already done for you.

Now, you just have to teach!

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What You Need To Know To Be Ready For Your Career

Employers want it. You need it.You aren’t born with it, but you can develop a positive work ethic.

Connecting Students With Local Employers

Teachers can arrange opportunities for students to connect with and learn from professionals in the community.

Scheduling regular lunches or learning workshops, virtual Q& As, career fairs, or even workplace tours are just a few of the ways instructors can provide their students with early exposure to various careers.

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How To Incorporate Career Readiness Activities Into Your Curriculum

Teaching theory alone is no longer sufficient.

Not when these life skills are the very tools they need in order to become successful adults.

Kids often spend more time in school than they do at home. For this reason, they cant be left to learn career readiness in the home setting alone. Instead, both parents and teachers need to play an active role in preparing them for the future.

Even if a school doesnt have a formal college or career readiness program, teachers can still bring related activities into their classrooms by:

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Why Are Employability Skills So Important

Employers say that they are more concerned with the level of Employability Skills employees have than ever before. They argue that certain technical skills can be taught more easily than soft or employability skills and that todays employees are found to be more and more lacking in these skills. Yet, its these very skills that can make or break a team or even a companys culture.

Businesses have gradually begun to shift in placing more and more value on culture and community in the workplace, attributes that are defined by such Employability Skills as Teamwork, Communication, Integrity, and Accountability. They have found that people who can effectively demonstrate these skills tend to be happier with their work, have good working relationships and feel valued by others are more productive and tend to stay with the company longer. This is why companies are placing a higher priority on such skills. Technical Skills are not enough any more. As one employer put it, We dont want any brilliant jerks working here.

• Can Soft Skills Be Learned?

Outline Lessons Needed To Meet Standards And / Or Goals

So you know what you want to happen by the end of class. You know what your students should have learned by certain points in the marking period.

But what lessons and activities do you need to make those goals realistic?

This is perhaps the most daunting and difficult task when designing a curriculum.

Lesson planning is one of the most intricate and important parts of teaching. But it takes a long time, and even if youre an experienced planner, you may wind up spending hours of your personal time hashing out lessons.

Fortunately, you have a few solutions on your hands.

To paraphrase Otis Kriegel of Western Governors University, you can pick what to borrow and what to make from scratch.

Teachers Pay Teachers is a great resource for this because they allow teachers to distribute or sell their most successful lesson plans.

Unfortunately, you usually have to pay for each lesson. That makes TpT a hard sell for a lot of teachers.

You may also be able to find free, high-quality lesson plans online. But because career readiness is such a new subject area for schools, thats a challenge all on its own.

The biggest advantage of TpT is that you know that the lesson plan works.

When you create one from scratch, you run the risk of the lesson being a dud, especially when youre teaching career readiness for the first time.

Regardless of how you get your lesson plans ready, youll eventually have to work them into a timeline with your curriculums goals and end vision.

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Assign Your Lessons To A Timeline

The timeline portion of your curriculum will essentially be a classroom syllabus.

Itll explain exactly what youre going to teach, what day youll teach it, and what homework would follow the lesson.

Completing this portion of your curriculum requires you to know exactly how many curriculum or classroom hours youll have to teach in a marking period.

Then, you can more accurately map out the lessons that you bought, found, or created into a solid sequence.

This timeline also requires you to integrate your teaching methodology.

The order of lessons you pursue will change depending on whether you use scaffolding learning, blended learning, differentiated instruction, or another teaching strategy.

Itll take time, but its an essential curriculum creation step that leads you to another important question.

What additional resources will you need throughout the marking period?

Job Readiness Activities For Adult Learners

Last week in Denver, attendees in the job readiness session participated in an activity to list the tools, resources and activities they currently use with clients. Heres the combined list. If possible, a link to a version of the activity is included. If you have a different version of any activity, or you have any resources to add, please so we can update the list!

Interview Practice

Welcome Circle: Begin Class by Asking Everyone Name, Origin, Languages and their First Job

First Day: Classroom Expectations Importance of Classroom Success

Incorporating Certificates after Job Day Trainings

Resume Jeopardy

Explain How to Transfer Skills

Look at Job Listing Examples and ask, Do you have the skills?

Presentations

Describe Career Dreams Using Pictures

Videos

Videos to show the Work Done at Different Jobs

Quality Control Video Quality, Quantity

Cards

Small Group Discussion about Hygiene & Dress

Small Groups Have clients create their own business & say what skills are needed for job

Specific Training Topics

Safety Classes: Use signs with Pictures, explain what signs mean. Explain the importance of reporting issues

Lessons on Trauma and the Impact of Trauma

Workplace Culture

Job Security/Responsibility to Communicate with Supervisors

Coworker relationships, manners, mannerisms

Adding Social Enterprises into your Curriculum

Financial Literacy

Explain Payroll, Direct Deposit and Tax Forms

Assist with Opening Bank Account

Translators/Interpreters

Other

Notes

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Tips For Building Your Skills

It can be frustrating when a teacher or parent says, You need to be more responsible but doesnt explain to you how to improve that skill. Keep in mind that while some soft skills may come more naturally than others due to personality traits and habits, as with any skill set, growing these skills requires both time and effort. Below are a few suggestions for how you can improve any of these critical skills:

NOTE: When applying for jobs that call out certain soft skills they are looking for, be sure to include these on your resume if they are areas of strength for you. If possible, briefly give an example or two of how youve demonstrated this skill.

The Easy Button For Career Readiness Curriculum: Aes

Creating career readiness curriculum by hand can take a lot of time and a ton of trial and error.

If youve never taught career readiness before, making a curriculum can also be awfully uncomfortable!

Fortunately, Business& ITCenter21 is here to back you up!

Business& ITCenter21 is a digital curriculum system packed with pre-made content that covers lessons, assessment, homework, and activities.

You access it through an Internet-connected devices web browser, and your students can do the same.

Whether youre on a computer, phone, or tablet, you can teach students the intricacies of professionalism, personal financial literacy, digital literacy, and a whole lot more.

Best of all, youll even get all the bells and whistles that make teaching easier features like automatic grading, student activity tracking, and on-demand reporting!

Want to learn more?

Just check out the AES career readiness curriculum for yourself!

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Request Purchases As Needed

While your schools up-for-grab resources may be free of charge to use, you may still need additional resources to fill in a few gaps.

Lets be honest that means someone has to buy something.

You may have a classroom budget. If you do, hopefully the resources you need can fit into that budget.

You may also have a department budget, which means youll probably have to file a request with your department head.

Beyond that, you may have to use a school budget, which gets complicated since youre going up against everyone else in your building who wants to buy something.

But those are just local opportunities.

You can still make purchases for career readiness curriculum resources by looking into special funding options.

These options include Perkins funding, the career and technical education grant from the federal government that gets issued every year.

Many schools and school districts have access to this funding, and its often available for any subject area related to CTE.

In many states and school districts, career readiness is also qualified for Perkins Funding.

If you cant find any budget options for your resources, dont pay out of pocket.

Check in with a colleague, supervisor, or department head to figure out what your other options may be!

Once you have your purchases all lined up, its time to embark on the last step of career readiness curriculum craftsmanship.