Expanding Students' Career Knowledge

As school counselors, we are consistently trying to provide our students with enriching career experiences. Throughout our lessons and day-to-day work with students, our department has found that our students are not aware of a vast majority of careers. An initiative of our School Counseling Department at Wamogo Regional High School has been to provide students with more firsthand career experiences. As a part of our student success plans, all of our 10th-grade students participate in a career lesson implemented by our school counselors. One piece of the career lesson includes completing a career inventory and personality assessment linking students’ interests to matching career paths.

Our school counselors were noticing that our students' current experiences mostly come from information they have gathered from parents, relatives and community members. About four years ago, we began to host an alumni career speaker series, which we now host annually. Our department reached out via social media, email and word of mouth to gather a robust group of individuals in a variety of career fields who were willing to come in and connect with students in small groups and sometimes even individually. Over the past few years, we have hosted more than 30 Wamogo graduates in fields including human resources, law enforcement, nursing, genetic studies, chemistry, business ownership, insurance brokerage, education, nursery studies, forestry, wildlife biology and many others.
 


To build interest and develop these small groups, we ask our alumni to provide a brief biography explaining their career paths. Students then sign up with their school counselor to attend. These small-group sessions allow students the opportunity to see the growth and change that an individual goes through and how paths can change multiple times. Often, students are shocked to see how much ebb and flow a particular person has experienced in one career journey. The main focus is for students to see that they have options and that no one set path leads to a particular career; in fact a variety of ways exist to establish a career and many different paths can lead to achieving one’s career goals.

Contact Stephanie Redmond, director of school counseling at Wamogo Regional High School, at sredmond@rsd6.org.