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.
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.
Careers like software developer, serial entrepreneur, social media strategist, and others are all great places to start for modern careers.
You can also use any number of more established or "traditional" careers, like accountant, psychiatrist, construction worker, clerk, and more.
Plus, you can always consider local or regional jobs that are on the rise. In many areas, that includes health care careers like certified nursing assistants, phlebotomists, or another area of expertise.
Now that you have your seed list of careers, you can dive into the steps of career exploration!
Each of these steps includes its own processes and procedures. We′ll take a look at each one in sequence so you can plan the best career exploration class possible!
Career Exploration: Research
The research phase of career exploration introduces students to specific careers that they want to understand more.
This is where students take your seed list, choose a few careers that sound interesting, and learn more about them. You have a ton of different ways to do this.
The most popular way is to have students go online to school-sanctioned websites to learn more. Your school may even pay for career exploration software that′s specifically designed for students to learn more about the working world.
Another way is to lecture. This relies on your knowledge of careers and traditional classroom resources (like textbooks). A third way is to network with professionals in your area and have them come discuss their career with your class.
This teaching method requires clearance from your school and some degree of coordination with individuals outside your school, which can get to be a lot of work on top of your regular teaching responsibilities.
But if students seem drawn to one career in particular, you have a perfect opportunity to contact someone who actually works in that field to speak to your class.
Regardless of how you teach the research phase of career exploration, you′ll have a perfect segue into the next step - evaluation.
Career Exploration: Evaluation
The evaluation step of career exploration empowers students to analyze the research they′ve conducted so they can get a deeper understanding of their favorite jobs.
Part of that understanding may be learning that a career simply isn′t a good fit for them at the moment.
That doesn′t mean that students will completely disregard a career, especially if they′re elementary - or middle-school aged students.
But it does mean that they can start looking into similar careers that may be more interesting to them. The process tends to follow a similar pattern for any grade level in career exploration. First, the students look at the career(s) that they chose to evaluate. Then, they also look at the careers that support (or are supported by) their first career.
That lets students branch off from their initial career interest and learn more about a collection of careers instead of just one at a time.
This is especially useful for tech-oriented careers like a software developer. Yes, software developers are highly in-demand right now, but to succeed, they need to work with information technology professionals, business professionals, quality assurance, marketing teams, and more.
In other words, a student may start the evaluation process by looking at a career that they think is perfect.
By the time they′re done reading, they may have a different career aspiration, purely because they learned something new!
The important victory here is that you′ve expanded your students′ horizons so that they can understand the breadth of possibilities in their futures.
Once students have done that, they can share their findings with the class during the discussion phase.
Career Exploration: Discussion
The discussion part of career exploration encourages students to talk about what they learned with their peers.
This lets students compare the careers they chose, why they liked those careers, and other offshoot careers that they discovered.
Students may also learn about new job tracks from their peers. The student from our previous example could tell their friends about IT and how interesting it is.
Likewise, two students may find out that they have a mutual career interest and hit it off talking about the requirements and possibilities of the job.
Students may also disagree about which careers they like. This may sound like a problem on the surface, but it can actually lead to constructive and educational conversation.
You may have to mediate the conversation a little bit, but ideally, each student discusses what they liked about one career and didn′t like about another.
This helps students understand what interests can lead to other careers while providing them with a fresh perspective on careers in general.
With that in mind, students can now get to the fourth step of almost any career exploration curriculum.
Career Exploration: Decision
The decision segment of career exploration revolves around students deciding which career they′d like to pursue more.
This does not mean that a student is choosing the career they′ll be for their entire lives.
But - just like the first three steps of the career exploration process - it gives students a direction so they can follow their passion to a fulfilling career.
This phase is typically the fastest of the career exploration steps. You can set whatever requirements you′d like to help students move forward in their career curiosities. You could also leave it all up to them how they go after their dreams.
Regardless, these four steps are the basics of career exploration. So why go through all of this, anyway?
After all, if your students are only with you for a semester or a quarter, can they really learn everything they need to improve their career outlooks?
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