How to Teach Career Pathways
Schools are taking a direct interest in helping students achieve their career and educational goals as they promote career pathways and clusters. These have been constructed by the National Career Technical Education Foundation and adopted by many states, including Indiana, Kansas and New Hampshire. The goal is to help students identify career clusters that fit within their interests and skills and then teach the career pathway that gets them to a job in their chosen fields.
Instructions
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Introduce the different pathways to students. Career clusters and pathways are a relatively new concept in education, so many students are unfamiliar with them. Take the time to talk about the different clusters and the pathways that lead to the careers within them.
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Provide a skills and interest assessment to students. Not all students know what they want to do after graduating from high school, but a skills and interest assessment can start to give them some idea. The results of this assessment can help them focus on the career clusters and pathways for which they scored high. The guidance counselor at your high school should have access to career, skill and interest assessments, or you can contact your state department of education to determine if there's a statewide assessment you can use.
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Explore different pathways. After students have taken the assessment, begin to explore as a class the different career pathways and clusters. Choose one pathway or cluster per week and make it the focus. Encourage discussion and activities that center on that pathway.
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Invite guest speakers to represent different pathways. Bringing in someone with a job in a particular career cluster or pathway helps to relate what's being taught in class to the real world. No longer is forensic science just a career you can go into. Now students have met someone with an actual job in the field who has explained what they do every day and what it took to get that specific job.
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Tour different career workplaces. Another way to connect career clusters and pathways to real life is to take students to different workplaces for a tour. This gives them the opportunity to see work being done in different fields, as well as ask questions of the people in that particular career field.
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Work individually with students to determine their pathways. After exploring the different career clusters and pathways available for students, it's important to work with them one on one to make a plan. The plan should be based on the career pathway the student has chosen or shown an interest in, and it should include a list of classes to take or extracurricular activities to join to help prepare them for this career. When students change their minds about their chosen career pathway, a counselor or teacher needs to sit down with them and revise their plans.
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