Category: Careers Connect

With support from Xello, ACTE launched the third brief in its student career development series, Unifying Your District: Collaborating to Support Student Career Development. Patrick Akos, professor and school counseling program coordinator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote:

“People are the most powerful force within any school district. When individuals unite around common goals, results tend to follow. But collaboration does not happen in a vacuum; it is a learned skill that requires effort, commitment and persistence.”

Professional learning communities inspire collaboration.

What it is and how collaboration works in the education setting can be a bit murky. But research is emerging about the effectiveness of professional learning communities (PLCs). PLCs hold regular meetings to discuss, plan and evaluate goals for student success. Here, we assert that the development of PLCs may help unify the efforts of school counselors and career and technical education (CTE) program leaders.

Contemporary school counselors receive “explicit and implicit messages on ‘college for all’ (Nicola, 2020) … [They] have minimal experience in CTE (Grewe, 2019), unaware that CTE is career and college preparation (Todd, 2017). They may have less time with students than teachers due to student-counselor ratios.

Additionally, while middle school counselors reported finding value in career and technical education, only 27% of middle school counselors made connections to CTE coursework.

ACTE and the American School Counselors Association agree, there is strong value in collaboration. But more work must be done to enhance collaboration among the CTE educators and school counselors in your local learning community.

CTE teachers collaborate with school counselors.

In the Vancouver School District, in Washington, CTE and school counseling leaders make up the Career and College Ready Taskforce. Along with other key stakeholders, they “create resources, tools and support for college and career readiness efforts in the district. They promote local (e.g., FutureMe) and other virtual resources (e.g., Xello). And they support the three Es — enrollment, enlistment and/or employment — after high school.

“Collaboration like this, led at the district level, models expectations for the building level.”

Get started.

1. Build relationships. This will take time, but successful collaboration requires trust. Engage in “productive discussion with mutual respect. A healthy interdependence is needed.”
2. Create goals around a shared vision: student career development. While traditional postsecondary outcomes have sometimes seemed at odds with workforce readiness, CTE stakeholders understand these ideals must work together. “Social, emotional and academic development influence career readiness, just as … career readiness and planning affect academic engagement and motivation.”
3. Develop curriculum that is relevant, appropriately sequenced and diverse. Project-based learning offers hands-on technical skill development, while also giving students an opportunity to see themselves in careers.
4. Spread the word about CTE in your school community. Teachers and school counselors work together to craft positive messaging about rigorous CTE programs of study. Host virtual curriculum events, or work with digital media students to develop videos and promotional materials.
5. Conduct regular assessments and evaluations to gauge program success. Learning outcomes offer valuable feedback on content and delivery and should influence program direction. Also, consider demographic data; reflect and design more equitable programming.

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Read the full brief sponsored by Xello — Unifying Your District: Collaborating to Support Student Career Development — to explore these and other best practices for collaboration about CTE educators and school counselors.

With support from Xello, ACTE launched the second brief in its student career development series, Delivering Real-world Experiences Through Work-based Learning. Kelli Diemer, ACTE’s work-based learning consultant, wrote:

“Comprehensive, high-quality career development includes work-based learning (WBL), including workplace tours, job shadowing, school-based enterprises, internships, and apprenticeships. In addition, WBL is often best defined by a strong partnership between education employer, and a motivated student.

“Today’s work-based learning:

• “Aligns learning with the CTE program of study outcomes
• “Serves the student’s interests and goals for developing specific skills and career exploration
• “Meets a need for an employer who also understands the program’s purpose because they recognize the value for the student”

Foundations of work-based learning

The paper, authored by Diemer, offers career and technical education (CTE) professionals deep insight into the power of WBL. High-quality work-based learning experiences must offer real-world relevance. “A 2008 study found that graduates of applied occupational programs reported applied learning experiences such as WBL as the most helpful in developing work skills (Mean >amp; Gonzalez, 2019, para. 3).”

Students and employers, alike, recognize the value in authentic, purpose-driven learning activities. Consider the General Construction Technology program at West-MEC’s Southwest campus. Program administrators established a partnership with Sutter Masonry. The industry partner supplies professionals to help instruct the students on masonry techniques, dedicating eight weeks of support and all needed supplies.” Sutter also “allows students to job shadow at

various job sites. These opportunities are aligned with the students’ college and career interests and offer meaningful interactions with professionals in the field.”

Best practices in work-based learning

“Establishing relevant and engaging WBL experiences does not happen by chance. It requires thoughtful leadership and perseverance, strong business partnerships, alignment between education and workplace learning, and much more.” As you consider a plan to implement work-based learning, heed the following advice.

1. Network, network, network. “Interact with friends, neighbors, school staff, and parents to open doors to engage employers with work-based learning activities.”
2. Offer varying opportunities for involvement. “A potential business partner may shy away from an internship commitment but be very willing to host a tour or sponsor a speaker for a class.”
3. Craft messaging that will appeal to your target audience. “General orientation materials would describe the program and the roles for the business, student and school. Orientation with the onsite supervisor/mentor should consist of specific on working with students, learning outcomes and the evaluation processes.”

Read the full brief sponsored by Xello — Delivering Real-world Experiences Through Work-based Learning — to explore these and other best practices for work-based learning in CTE.

Resources

• The U.S. Department of Education’s Work-based Learning Toolkit “includes a series of guidelines and resources that local administrators can use to engage employers, scale effective programs, build data collection and ultimately connect learning to the workplace through an instructional strategy.”
• ACTE’s Quality CTE Program of Study Framework (2018) outlines the need for “sustained, meaningful interactions with industry or community professionals that foster in-depth, firsthand engagement with the tasks required in a given career field,” and provides a set of criteria for a quality WBL program.

Early career influences are consequential. Career exploration in the early grades exposes students to varied pathways. Hobbies, extracurricular activities and electives in elementary and middle school shape career and technical education (CTE) pathways.

Starting Early: Career Development in the Early Grades, a new brief produced by ACTE and sponsored by Xello, offers promising strategies to help educators ready students for curricular and early career choices.

Integrate career exploration into core content.

“Why do I need to learn this?” Students want to know. Hands-on, experiential learning encourages students to take agency over their education. And students may begin to connect the dots between academic standards and career competencies.

CareerStart is a program developed in partnership between the Winston-Salem/Forsyth School district and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They integrated career examples in four core subject areas.

“Not only did only did students report increased belonging and engagement in school, they demonstrated enhanced transition to middle school and improved achievement (Woolley et al., 2013). Further, rigorous evidence even showed a trend in closing achievement gaps for underrepresented students (Rose et al., 2012).”

Imagine the classroom and school as a workplace.

Your students will love it! Imagine the potential job opportunities at school. Transform your learning environment into a mock workplace. Develop roles such as classroom computer engineer, morning news broadcaster or library assistant. Encourage students to consider personal strengths, as well as their interests, before deciding while role suits them best. Teachers may conduct mock interviews and/or performance evaluations. As a result, students “extend career skills such as self-management, relationship and communication skills, and responsible decision-making.

“These experiences prompt understand of the world of work and give students an opportunity for career exploration and growth while enhancing the school community.”

Additional strategies discussed include:

• “At A.J. Lindeman Elementary School in Kentucky, staff combine a career walk and a visit to the reality store. Students buy life essentials based on the salaries of career choices to envision future lifestyles. The broader Operation Occupation (Mariani et al., 2016) includes token economies in classrooms, targeted school counselor and career infused classroom lessons, a career fair and more.
• “Students at middle schools in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula spend summers at Delta-Schoolcraft Career Tech Center changing motor oil and rotating tires, learning basic welding, and making key fobs with a computer numerical control mill. Similarly, elementary schools in the Chula Vista School District in CA visit Innovation Stations created with local energy-based companies to explore hands-on work matched to early interests.”

Get started. 

The examples provided hinge on a “planned and programmatic approach to early grades CTE. ACTE provides many tools to accomplish this task.” Resources such as:

• Defining Quality: Student Career Development
• Broadening the Path: Design Principles for Middle Grades CTE

Understand that new programs of study can be confusing. To facilitate career exploration in a manner that is effective, all stakeholders must undertake “professional development in order to translate programming and stay aligned with current trends.”

Everyone has a role to play. Start now. “These efforts can make CTE programming in high school more fluid.” When students and their families begin career exploration earlier, they become better able to “navigate curricular, postsecondary and career paths required in today’s dynamic world of work.”

Read Starting Early: Career Development in the Early Grades. The brief was written by Patrick Akos — a professor in the School of Education at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — and sponsored by Xello.

The challenge of the century

It’s been more than 100 years since the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released its groundbreaking study that revealed a surprising truth. What really works when it comes to career and workplace success? In the study, 1,500 working engineers were asked to rate the qualities they believed were most instrumental in determining the probability of success or failure in their field. Overwhelmingly, the respondents ranked personal qualities far higher in importance than knowledge or expertise:

• Oral and written communication
• Professionalism
• Work ethic
• Critical thinking/problem solving

In two words: soft skills

In 2013, Google reviewed its hiring data — accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998 — to determine the top career-success indicators. They were astonished; STEM expertise came in dead last. Atop the list were seven soft skills.

Mark Butler, commissioner for the Georgia Department of Labor, recently commented, “The biggest reason people aren’t getting work right now is not so much a lack of technical training; it’s really their lack of soft skills.”

Why is it so hard to close the soft skills gap?

That’s what Cindi Reiman, founder and president of the American Hospitality Academy (AHA) — and a pioneer in bridging the gap between what young people know and what industry demands — set out to discover when she created Soft Skills High. In the 30 years prior, AHA provided career-focused curriculum and structured internships for thousands of college students from around the world.

“It was through these close working relationships with industry leaders that our team developed a clear understanding of how to best teach the 21st century skills that are vital to success in any career,” Reiman said. “But the teaching had to start sooner, while the kids were still learning about life.”

Reiman and her Soft Skills High team spent months creating their online curriculum, and then it was time to put it to the test. In 2017, with a grant from District 150 and the support from Michael Kuhn, principal and director at Woodruff Career and Technical Center, Reiman returned to her hometown of Peoria, Illinois, to pilot Soft Skills High with its flagship course: Career and Life Essentials. Delivered completely online, the course consists of 10 interactive modules. Eventually, 12 high schools across five states participated in the program.

Reiman and her team identified three issues that would need to be addressed in order to deliver an effective soft skills curriculum.

A successful soft skills curriculum must complement current course offerings and be easily integrated into high school programming.

Schools and teachers needed an online and engaging program that could be incorporated into student coursework. Due to the flexibility of the Soft Skills High platform, teachers reportedly discovered many ways to incorporate the program into their students’ schedules.

A successful soft skills curriculum enables teachers to keep their core content intact.

Soft Skills High is geared specifically for high school students and demonstrates best practices for integrating instruction into the school day. The employability skills program operates as a true virtual school with live course facilitators, classmates and discussion boards. Soft Skills High eliminates the burden of creating lesson plans and enables teachers to keep their current core curriculums intact.

A successful soft skills curriculum will assess students’ progress.

Soft Skills High offers various methods of assessing student progress and engagement including quizzes after each module, discussion boards and writing prompts, as well as a final exam. Upon successful completion — a score of 70% or higher — students receive a certificate to validate their accomplishments. Additionally, teachers have easy and instant access to student data on the Teacher’s Desk.

Get ready. Get prepped. Go!

Two years after the successful pilot program, Soft Skills High still begins with the Career and Life Essentials course designed to get students ready for career and life success. The second step, Career Prep, was developed to prepare students for the workplace; in this course, they benefit from the opportunity to build a career portfolio that includes self-assessments, goal setting, resume and interviewing skills. Then it’s time to go into the Soft Skills Pro certificate program where students showcase their competency on the job, earning an industry credential.

“At Soft Skills High, it’s our hope that our students become better and more successful people today who go on to become better and more successful employees tomorrow.”

Digital marketing managers develop media strategy designed to increase brand awareness and recognition for a company or organization. They design, implement and manage marketing campaigns that promote entities and their products and services. Other responsibilities may include finding and evaluating new technologies to increase web and social media traffic. A digital marketing manager’s goal:

• To enhance advertising and marketing campaigns
• To increase customer leads and conversions

A digital marketing manager might work with or lead a team of graphic designers, copywriters and advertising/media professionals.

The workplace

Digital marketing managers work for advertising and public relations firms; they also work in nearly every industry — in large and small companies, and public and private organizations. Science and technology, manufacturing, finance, insurance — you name it.

Education

Most digital marketing professionals will hold an associate or a bachelor’s degree. A degree is important, but work-based learning experiences are far more valuable, suggested Sandra Rand, director of marketing at OrionCKB, a direct response ad agency in Walpole, Massachusetts.

Career and technical education presents a great pathway to this career.

Earnings

Salaries for digital marketing managers range $75,283–$148,765, according to Salary.com. Glassdoor indicates an average of $75,251, with the highest earning $111,000.

Job Outlook

Expect employment of advertising, promotions and marketing managers to grow 8% from 2018–2028 as organizations seek to maintain and even expand their market share. “With internet advertising becoming more important, advertising managers who can navigate the digital world should have the best prospects.”

Discover additional resources to learn more about the career of digital marketing manager.

• Advertising >amp; Marketing Independent Network Worldwide
• American Advertising Federation
• American Marketing Association
• Association of Digital Marketing Professionals
• Digital Marketing Association
• eMarketing Association
• Internet Marketing Association
• National Council for Marketing and Public Relations
• Social Media Club

Engineering is part two in a new series on STEM jobs of the future, by Ashley Pereira and Jacqui Schlesinger. Read part one, on technology jobs.

Engineers touch everything we interact with in daily life. They design bridges. Engineers innovate new beauty products, and they launch space exploration tools. Dozens of engineering sectors exist already. And growth into new frontiers expands rapidly.

Encourage your career and technical education (CTE) students to be innovators in engineering. Consider the following careers emerging now:

Space travel engineer >amp; flight planner

Many people dream, from childhood, of visiting space. Now, thanks to private companies like SpaceX, that dream is becoming reality. As the world saw for the first time in 2020, commercial rocket launches are possible, and many new space travel companies are likely to emerge. One ticket to the International Space Station can be yours for a cool $55 million.

As NASA aims for the moon by 2024 and Mars in the 2030s, the horizons of space are wide open!

The commercial spaceflight industry is in its infancy, but the need for planners and space travel engineers for space is pressing. Space travel engineers will have a wide variety of responsibilities — from designing a rocket to coordinating a commercial rover launch on the moon — to make space travel safe and enjoyable for everyone.

For high-profile clients, space travel agents will be in demand. They’ll plan seven-course liftoff meals and make sure the rover has heated seats.

A space travel engineer or planner could earn as much as $117,000!

Interstellar city planner

Imagine living on a different planet. Wake up and put on your space suit so you can breathe. Learn about nearby planets in geography class. In the evening, you might look up at the sky to see Earth and the moon far away.

Interstellar life could be the future for much of humanity as Earth’s swelling population continues to deplete its resources. But, before we inhabit these new worlds, someone will have to design them. That’s where an interstellar city planner comes in.

The job will require lots of research and development to help society adapt in different environments. Like urban planning today, this enormous task will require feedback from potential inhabitants and many professionals in supporting fields.

Interstellar city planners will have the exciting task of designing an entirely new and innovative society on a faraway planet. They can expect to earn at least $74,000 with a master’s degree in urban planning or related field.

Self-driving car engineer

Innovations in automobile design and technology are already changing the future of driving. But what happens when a teenager wants to get their license to drive a flying car? And who will fix the flying and self-driving machines of the future?

New jobs created by these emerging feats of engineering will be influential both in sheer number and financial opportunity. For every new type of car, engineers will be needed to design, build, teach and fix. Companies like Terrafugia and Waymo (backed by Google) are already developing autonomous vehicles. In addition to transporting people, autonomous vehicles also have commercial and logistics applications (e.g., delivering packages for Amazon, restocking Walmart after a natural disaster).

A bachelor’s degree in automotive engineering is a good place to start; new car technology engineers might earn a salary of $88,000.

Trash and recyclables construction specialist

The United States is the ‘king of trash’, producing an average of 4.4 pounds of garbage per person, per day. This isn’t sustainable. Trash and recyclables often end up in the ocean, on the side of the road and in overflowing landfills. Pollution harms the natural world and, to solving these issues, that’s where a trash and recyclables construction specialist comes in.

Forget wood and nails. Try reused plastic and reshaped metal cans! Construction engineers of the future will innovate to meet building codes that live up to increasingly stringent environmental standards. A perfect career for those who like to experiment with new materials and work with their hands! Can you imagine taking a pile of trash and creating a house? That’s the future of construction!

Construction specialists need to earn a bachelor’s degree in construction management; they may earn $95,000 per year.

Engineering jobs of the future are critical to the advancement of all branches of STEM. Science, technology and math professionals all will benefit from exposure to engineering fields, as they enter a job market predicated on critical thinking skills and innovation.

These careers represent only a few of the rapidly evolving fields within STEM. Come back soon, to PAGES, a Techniques blog, for our next feature on STEM jobs of the future: science!

Jacqui Schlesinger is passionate about STEM education and career development. As a rising high school junior in the Boston area, she is involved with several organizations including Career In STEM, The Math Club of Lexington, her school’s STEM Education Club, and the Masshire MNWB Youth Committee. She also enjoys playing tennis, writing and exploring nature.

Ashley Pereira is a former middle and high school science teacher, and owner of Career In STEM. She creates engaging STEM career exploration resources to prepare middle school students to succeed in future STEM careers.