Why School Districts Should Innovate to Support Career Readiness
Career readiness involves career planning from K through 12.
Career readiness involves career planning from K through 12. The sooner students are exposed to career exploration and career learning opportunities, the better they will be in planning their career paths and reaching their best-fit careers. To help students do it, school districts need to innovate and encourage the use of innovative career planning tools in schools. Running tech tools for school counselors can also help implement and speed up such innovation by making the counselors adept in using a wide variety of online tools to get students career-ready.
Here are the top three reasons why school districts should innovate to support students’ career readiness:
1- Career exploration
Schools should start exposing students to different career paths as early as middle school. Such exposure should ideally continue throughout their high school years.
But since helping every student will be tough for a limited number of physical counselors, who’re already burdened by different administrative and counseling tasks, using innovative career planning tools can help.
The responsibility is on school districts to encourage the use of such online tools that will help students explore a number of career options on their own. Since a dependable career planning tool like CounselHero will come with assessment tests, students can take them to understand themselves better and choose a career path that suits their inclination and aptitude the best.
2- Planning a career path
After zeroing in on a career path, students need to plan the road they’ll need to take to attain their career goals. For some, it could mean enrolling in a four-year educational institution or community college, while others could target enlisting in the military or getting admitted to a trade school. Such planning, when started early on, would also mean choosing courses or taking up internships or summer jobs that will add meat to their resume and help them in the application process to their targeted courses, colleges, or other educational institutions.
By running tech tools for school counselors, school districts can make them aware of how to use online innovative career planning tools to find information about all these different aspects to help students plan the ideal way to pursue their targeted careers.
3- Encourage a broader approach to career readiness
Career readiness isn’t just about colleges and courses. It’s a much wider domain. Helping students get career-ready doesn’t mean helping them find a job. Rather, it’s about guiding them with the right information to let them pursue a career that aligns with what they’re passionate about and good at.
This demands that schools and educational institutions think about career readiness in broader terms to embrace a lot of things beyond academics.
School districts can encourage and support such thinking. For instance, schools that have close ties with the local business community and chamber of commerce can help their students get summer jobs or internships where they experience what the job environment feels like and how they need to handle real-life challenges and work pressure. All of these would be precious in getting them college-ready. If you’re wondering where you can get information about such work opportunities for students, innovative career planning tools with extensive libraries and resources can help.
