Making Hope And Aspirations Happen
“Many Gen Z teens don’t feel career ready. What if we made students aware of all of the many options available to them early on, starting in middle school (or even sooner)?”
That’s the challenge for K-12 career education presented by the authors of a report entitled Success Redefined issued by American Student Assistance and Jobs for the Future. The report is based on a Morning Consult poll of over 1,100 high school graduates who opted not to go to college directly after high school.
Nearly one out of three non-college youth (32%) reports a lack confidence in knowing the steps to take to transition into a post-high school career and further education. Two out of three (64%) who did not take career pathway programs say they would have considered pathway programs if they knew more about them.
The barriers to not pursuing pathway programs include a lack of encouragement from those at school to explore them. The preferred sources of information for the post-high school plans of non-college youth were searching the web (87%) and watching online videos (81%).
Early Childhood To Grade 12 Frameworks Create A Virtuous Cycle
One way education stakeholders, including employers, solve the career education problem is through career education frameworks. These frameworks create a progression of career education activities for young people where one activity builds on the past activity and creates a sequence of continuous learning about jobs and careers.
This virtuous cycle ensures that by the end of high school, young people acquire knowledge, skills, relationships, and aspirations, the foundation for developing their individual and social identity and agency. It prepares them to take the next step in life, whether that be a job, further education and training, or a combination of both.
A comprehensive career education program begins with a child’s earliest years and continues to the end of high school. “Students who have a longer career exploration runway are better positioned to make more informed decisions along their education journey to put them on a path to life-long economic success and personal fulfillment,” according to research conducted by Education Strategy Group for American Student Assistance.
The international 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compiled approaches to career education used around the world. They propose a framework for organizing career education activities inspired by a New Zealand model that is organized by three categories: exposure, exploration, and experience.
Exposure introduces children and young people to careers beginning as early as preschool. It includes activities like reading books, telling stories about people in different occupations, and hearing directly from workers during classroom visits. As students move through elementary, middle, and high school, exposure activities include age-appropriate outside-of-school experiences, such as workplace visits.
Exploration offers students the opportunity to research and evaluate specific occupations. It includes activities like resume development, mock job interviews, volunteer work, and job shadowing. These experiences typically span a student’s middle- and high-school years.
Experience consists of work-based learning which involves engaging in sustained and supervised projects and mentorships. It includes activities like internships, apprenticeships, and cooperative programs. These experiences multiply students’ career options by offering students work opportunities that lead to full-time jobs, further education, or both.
More Career Education Frameworks
There are career education frameworks specific to English-speaking countries. The United Kingdom has the Gatsby Benchmarks., a national framework of eight career education benchmarks for its schools (and colleges) commissioned by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. The Careers and Enterprise Company, the U.K.’s national body that oversees career education, works through its network of Career Hubs with schools, colleges, employers, and apprenticeship providers across England.
Other examples include Australia’s Blueprint for Career Development; New Zealand’s WE3 Continuum and Activities (which inspired the OECD framework); and New Brunswick, Canada’s Career Education and Development Framework
The U.S. has a growing number of states and localities that have or are developing career education frameworks. Here are five examples:
- Maryland’s work-based learning continuum is based on career awareness, career exploration, career preparation, and career seeking and advancement.
- Colorado’s work-based learning framework includes learning about work, learning through work, and learning at work.
- California has a framework for career and technical education but is creating a master plan for an all-inclusive career education framework.
- Texas has a Work Based Learning Continuum with descriptions of the roles of stakeholders, including providers, K-12 schools, colleges, workforce boards, and other community organizations.
- Park County, Montana has created a Community School Collaborative framework that considers the unique problems faced by rural schools.
Finally, there are technology platforms like EvolveMe and You Science that districts, schools, and community organizations use to assist with the implementation of these frameworks.
A Virtuous Cycle Makes Hope Happen
The exposure, exploration, and experience continuum—and others like it—produces a virtuous cycle of progressive activities that deepen a young person’s understanding of the structure and culture of work. This virtuous cycle corresponds with how learning occurs in the developing brains of children and adolescents.
One aspect of the brain’s plasticity is its dependence on engaging with and incorporating external inputs. This sustained engagement nurtures the mental capacity called cognitive endurance, or the ability to practice thinking and doing for extended periods. The type of learning acquired through exposure, exploration, and experience is important to this process. “Among its other benefits, schooling may expand students’ underlying capacity for cognition, including the ability to engage in effortful thinking, which constitutes a more expansive view of how education shapes general human capital,” write the authors of a study on cognitive endurance as human capital development.
A final consideration relates to what the late psychologist and senior Gallup scientist Shane Lopez in his book Making Hope Happen calls the three essential elements of the hope cycle. The first is “future casting” or goals thinking, which helps us define and set achievable future outcomes. The second is “triggering action” or pathways thinking, which creates a specific route to those outcomes. The third is agency thinking, which produces the mental energy and self-reliance needed to pursue one’s goals along defined pathways.
Pathways thinking and agency thinking work together to foster the pursuit of goals. This framework makes it clear that mastering a discipline is more than the utility of acquiring a marketable skill. It also shapes our thinking in ways that lead to setting and achieving goals, the basis for “…a theory of hope [that helps] to explain how to arrive at successful aspirations,” write the authors of a research paper on youth aspirations.
The Benefits of Career Education
This approach to career education has many benefits. Young people acquire the general and technical knowledge and skills they need for success in life. They also develop professional relationships and networks or the social capital necessary for success. Psychological benefits include building a young person’s occupational identity and vocational self. This gives them a better sense of their values and abilities and the importance of achieving other life goals.
On a practical front, this approach also creates faster and cheaper ways to prepare individuals for jobs and careers. Moreover, it also fosters local civic engagement from employers and other community partners.
Career education develops a young person’s capacity to aspire and navigate the pathways they must follow to achieve their aspirations so that they reach their potential and succeed and flourish as adults. It fosters young people’s individual and social agency, including the capacity to aspire, create, and navigate the pathways that make a reality of their ambitions and hopes.
Evidence Of Success
A major challenge facing career education is “the struggle to show it works,” writes Patrick Wall in The Hechinger Report. This involves connecting what happens in career education to workforce career outcomes. Only 27 states have data systems that link education and employment information.
OECD examined the link between 15-year-old students’ participation in career education and adult career outcomes in 8 countries, including the U.S. Their report concludes that there is “evidence that secondary school students who explore, experience, and think about their futures in work frequently encounter lower levels of unemployment, receive higher wages, and are happier in their careers as adults.”
It also reviewed longitudinal data from countries that examine the relationship between career education for secondary school students and adult employment outcomes. From that research, it developed a list of 11 indicators that are related to teenage career readiness and their potential work futures that is organized by its career education categories of exposure, exploration, and experience.
The New Basics Of Opportunity
Introducing children and young people to jobs and careers through exposure, exploration, and experience creates a virtuous cycle that helps them navigate life after high school whatever pathway they choose. It ensures they develop the basics for pursuing opportunity: knowledge—what individuals know; relationships—whom they know; and identity—who they are.
These new basics allow young people to acquire profitable knowledge, priceless relationships, and an identity that elevates their self-worth and promotes human flourishing. In short: Knowledge + Relationships + Identity = Opportunity.