Career Connections Sessions

We implemented Career Connections in an effort to expose students to a careers that match their interests. Our 4th and 5th graders completed career interest inventories to identify their career interests. The inventories used include: SCOIS CLIMB which is SC specific (and FREE for SC schools) and O*Net which is free for all (see post about how we utilize this inventory in lessons here). We recorded the top 3 interests for each student and we use this data to select students to attend Career Connections Sessions.

Career Connections Sessions are 25 minute sessions in which a guest speaker shares his/her career journey with selected students. What works for us is offereing two back to back sessions for each speaker (25 4th graders and then 25 5th graders). We recruited speakres internally by asking staff for recommendations for popular career clusters and then followed their leads. An alternative would be to send a letter out to school families to recruit speakers.

We notify students that they are invited to participate in Career Connections the morning of the session by delivering invitations to their classrooms in the morning. We had the invitations printed on business cards through VistaPrint. The kids enjoy the novelty of the business card invitations!

This year we have ten speakers on the schedule spread over five months. With two sessions per speaker we should have enough space for each student to go to two sessions. Personally, I find this scenario easier to plan than a large career day. I also like that it's based on student interest inventory results (data, data, data!). And with 25 minutes sessions they are getting in depth information and ample time to explore different aspects of the career. As for our K-3 students, we started the Tracker Career Awareness Program. I purchashed the program on TeachersPayTeachers. ALL students K-5 are exposed to a variety of careers between the Career Connections and Tracker Career Awareness Program as well as two career awareness & explorations classroom lessons per classroom. It's been a great experience to see the kids get so excited about careers!