1. What Is Career Exploration?
In education, career exploration is the process of researching, evaluating, and learning about modern work opportunities and how students can pursue the careers of their choice.
That makes career exploration one of the most important subjects in terms of long-term life planning for students in any grade. Learning career exploration early can make a difference in learners’ abilities to understand their options and choose a fulfilling profession. For this reason, it is important to consider career exploration an essential part of middle and high school curriculum.
2. How Does Career Exploration Work?
With that in mind, let’s consider the different aspects of career exploration in detail, starting with how career exploration works.
For the most part, it is broken down into 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 often helpful to start with a 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.
Now that you have your list of common and popular careers, you can dive into the steps of career exploration! Each of these steps includes its own processes and procedures.
To start, let’s talk about research.
Career Exploration Step 1: Research
The research step of career exploration introduces students to specific careers that they want to understand more about.
This is where students take your starter list, choose a few careers that sound interesting, and learn more about them.
There are many different ways to go about career research. The most popular method is to have students go online to school-sanctioned websites to learn more.
Another way is to give class talks or lectures about careers. This relies on a teacher’s 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 in a 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 Step 2: Evaluation
The evaluation step of career exploration empowers students to analyse the research they’ve conducted so they can get a deeper understanding of their favourite jobs.
Part of that understanding may be learning that a career simply isn’t a good fit for them at the moment. This 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 method is especially useful for tech-oriented careers like a software developer. While software developers are in high demand, 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 learning outcome here is that you’ve expanded a 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 Step 3: Discussion
The discussion step 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 begin talking about the requirements and possibilities of the job.
Students may also disagree about which careers they like. This can lead to a constructive conversation about the benefits and drawbacks to working in particular industries. Ideally, your students will discuss what they liked about one career and disliked about another. This helps learners appreciate what interests can lead to specific careers while discovering others’ perspective on career opportunities.
With that in mind, students can now get to the fourth step, making a decision
Career Exploration Step 4: Decision
The decision step 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 since it’s informed directly by the previous three steps. Since students have already learned about opportunities in different career pathways, they might be prepared to make a decision about which pursue they’d most like to pursue.
Now is the time to talk to your students about the next steps in moving forward with a career path. Teachers can set whatever requirements they think will help their learners move forward, or leave the decision-making process entirely up to them.
Regardless, these four steps are the basics of career exploration. But why should you spend time on career exploration?