Career Readiness from K-8

Promoting Career Readiness in Middle School

By Stacey Polson, Lander Middle School

At Lander Middle School we teach a weeklong class on Career Exploration to all eighth-grade students. My fellow counselor, Cristina Jensen, and I present our kids with a couple of different interest inventories and lead open discussions about the importance of enjoying what you do in life. We also look at personality and discuss why it’s important to find jobs that match who you are as a person. Our students participate in interactive activities that get them up and moving and help them not only get to know themselves a little better, but also build stronger connections with their peers.

Once students know what their interests are, they learn about career clusters and try to fit their skills and passions within various clusters. We use the website educationplanner.org to drill down to occupations that may be a good fit for them. Each student then chooses three occupations to explore and create a short report to their peers. The report contains information such as a job summary, education required, wages and related occupations. We use fun strategies to keep things interactive. I often have students come in the next day with five more jobs they researched on their own.

At the end of our unit, we have a day we call “Real Life 101.” This activity is really fun for us and the kids because we start to see them make real-life connections to what they are learning. We give each student a sheet with a life scenario – it has their housing, car, family/marriage, and special circumstances, all with monetary information. So a student might get a scenario with a spouse, two kids, an apartment, a vehicle, student loans, medical bills, childcare bills, etc. They then have to use a monthly budget sheet to see if they could “survive” using their monthly income from an occupation of their choice. We have so much fun watching the a-ha moments as students realize they might not be able to afford a big truck or five kids or be able to get around with just a bicycle. We also see them start making connections to their own family budgets as they understand why they don’t have money for cell phones or extra groceries.

Our time is pretty limited, but students report back how much they enjoy this class. Just last year I had a former student working in our building sit in on class and she brought her career packet in to show the class that she still had hers from back when she was an eighth-grader.

Career Readiness for Early Elementary Students

By Virginia Collins, Dubois K-12 School Counselor, Fremont County, WY, School District #2

Mindsets and Behaviors addressed:
M 2. Self-confidence in ability to succeed
M 4. Understanding that postsecondary education and life-long learning are necessary for long term career success
B-LS 9. Gather evidence and consider multiple perspectives to make informed decisions
B-SMS 3. Demonstrate ability to work independently
B-SMS 10. Demonstrate ability to manage transitions and ability to adapt to changing situations and responsibilities
B-SS 9. Demonstrate social maturity and behaviors appropriate to the situation and environment
 
To explore careers with kindergarten, first- and second-grade students over a three-week period with 20-minute classroom lessons, I use the books: “Whose Hat Is This?” “Whose Tools Are These?” and “Whose Vehicle Is This?” from the series by Sharon Katz Cooper.


We start the lesson with a general definition of careers as the time spent in a job or profession. Next, we discuss the jobs or careers that students’ parents might have. Then, we read one of the books as a class, with children guessing “Whose is it?” for each page. After reading, we select a few of the careers and brainstorm skills that are learned in school that would be important for success in those careers. For example, what types of skills are important for an airline pilot to have? Finally, students are invited to imagine themselves in a future career and draw a picture of themselves performing tasks related to their job. Older students can include a sentence describing a necessary skill. (For example, an airline pilot needs to know how to read.) These illustrations can be displayed on a bulletin board for all students to view.

Students enjoy guessing which job is portrayed, and start making connections between what they learn in school, and what they will be doing once they finish school.