Career Exploration

Career Exploration is simply learning about various occupations and their "fit" with your unique career preferences, e.g. the skills, interests and values you want satisfied by your career. Ideally, you engage in career exploration during or after identifying your career preferences through self-assessment.

Career Exploration Resources

How Does Career Exploration Work?

Different schools, education experts, and teachers all have a different way of teaching career exploration. For the most part, they break down to four main steps that help students learn more about the working world around them.

  • Research
  • Evaluation
  • Discussion
  • Decision

Before jumping right into these steps, it’s smart to start with a seed list of careers that are either common or popular in the world right now.

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How Do You Know When Career Exploration Succeeds?

"Success" is a tricky topic when it comes to teaching.
Everyone wants to know whether they’re successfully teaching - but how do you actually measure that success? For career exploration, you have a couple different methods at your fingertips. First, you can measure the percentage of students in your class who have concretely chosen a career they want to investigate further.
In other words, you keep track of how many students have a definite answer in the decide portion of career exploration.

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Two types of career exploration

To effectively pursue career exploration, an individual should explore both their internal and external environments. The Build Your Future curriculum offers youth this opportunity and provides resources for exploring and developing a career path. A youth’s decision of which career path to choose is often guided by information-seeking activities. This information seeking should include both internal and external exploration. Author J. Zikic indicates there are two types of career exploration: self-exploration and environmental exploration.

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