Table of Contents
Introduction
The pathway from classroom to career can’t be conveyed by an ideal, one-size-fits-all map. Neither Siri, Alexa, nor a GPS can guide students from where they are now to where they want to be in the future.
But today’s educators can. In fact, if they want to engage students more deeply in the classroom, boost academic achievement, and support career equity, they must.
To help students build and navigate fitting career exploration journeys, teachers, career counselors, and other educators must be prepared to introduce, engage, and guide students through these four dynamic stages:
- Personal discovery: Reflecting on your interests, values, skills, and goals to understand what motivates you and aligns with your aspirations
- Career Awareness: Researching and learning about different careers, industries, and the education and/or training they require
- Career Evaluation: Analyzing specific career options to assess how well they fit your goals, preferences, and lifestyle
- Career Preparation: Building the knowledge, skills, and experiences necessary to successfully pursue a chosen career path
This post explores each of these stages with actionable tips and ideas designed for today’s educators. We also share how Pathway2Careers (P2C) makes every step engaging, impactful, and smooth.
The 4 Stages of Career Exploration
Personal discovery
The journey toward finding a fulfilling career should begin with self-awareness. Through personal discovery, students learn essential things about themselves—including their interests, values, strengths, and abilities which lay the groundwork for making informed decisions about their academic and professional pathways.
Personal discovery requires students to reflect on their identities, viewpoints, and experiences. They should be encouraged to consider the problems they enjoy solving, how they interact with the world, and what drives their curiosity.
Personal discovery activities
Teachers, career counselors, peer mentors, and other educators can ask students these questions in one-on-one or group discussions, journaling exercises, or assessment tools:
- If you could spend a whole day doing any activity, what would it be and why?
- What is your favorite thing to learn about in school, and why?
- What activities or tasks do your friends and family say you’re really good at?
- Think about a time you overcame a challenge. What skills or traits did you use to succeed?
- If you could solve one big problem in the world, what would it be and why?
- What motivates you to do your best work? Do you value receiving praise, helping others, winning competitions, or something else?
- If you could try out a job for a week, what would you choose and why?
- Imagine your ideal future. What does a happy or successful life look like to you?
How Pathway2Careers supports personal discovery
Interest Matcher
This self-led 60-question quiz invites students to consider how much they enjoy (or don’t enjoy) various activities, such as building kitchen cabinets, studying ways to reduce water pollution, and playing a musical instrument.
Students are then shown how well their interests align with the six personality types (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional) identified by renowned psychologist John Holland, also known as Holland Codes or RIASEC types.
Values Matcher
This 5-minute activity asks participants how much they value 20 job attributes, such as having opportunities for advancement, receiving recognition, and working alone.
The results page reveals how much a student prioritizes six global work values: relationships, independence, achievement, support, working conditions, and recognition.
After taking the Interests Matcher and Values Matcher, the student’s personal Career Page will change to display details about specific careers and clusters that fit that student best.
Career awareness
During the career awareness stage, the focus shifts from self-reflection to outward exploration. Once students understand themselves better, they can explore opportunities in their communities, states, and around the world. Career awareness introduces students to the wide range of modern career paths, along with the skills, experiences, and academic pathways required of each.
This stage is crucial for building or expanding upon students’ ambitions. By broadening their horizons, particularly students from underrepresented or marginalized communities, career awareness helps dismantle stereotypes and encourages students to pursue careers they may otherwise deem inaccessible.
Career awareness activities
The following activities can foster students’ career awareness:
- Career fairs
- Guest speakers and career stories
- Industry tours and field trips
- Exploring The National Career Clusters® Framework
How Pathway2Careers supports career awareness
Career Library
Students can discover over a thousand occupations right from the P2C Platform. Sub-pages and filters keep that number from being overwhelming, as users can quickly narrow down their options based on interests, values, education requirements, career clusters, and more.
Career Stories
Students do not have to solely rely on standard job descriptions, which can be dull; with P2C, they can hear directly from enthusiastic professionals who bring their everyday work to life in 240+ video career stories. In these dynamic interviews, which are available to all P2C users on demand, workers share their educational backgrounds, why they find their work fulfilling, opportunities for advancement and more.
A teacher can even use these videos to design a virtual career fair—which they can present to students during class or encourage learners to explore on their own.
Career Spotlights
P2C Math incorporates career awareness information into Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry curriculum by featuring Career Spotlights that describe an occupation, along with its education requirements, potential employers, career cluster(s), and salary projections. Career Spotlights also lay out the math concepts that professionals frequently use within that occupation and describe daily responsibilities in a section titled “is this a good career for me?”.
Career evaluation
Career evaluation is like planning a meal. Previously, students determined their unique palette and appetite through personal discovery. Then, they reviewed popular entrees (or rather, careers) through career awareness.
Now, it’s time to do a deeper dive to evaluate their career options, akin to evaluating potential recipes for the perfect meal. Just as a home cook reads reviews, taste-tests ingredients, and inventories their kitchen tools, career explorers assess individual career factors and immerse themselves in real-life workplace experiences.
Factors students may evaluate include:
- Local job market demand
- Salary expectations
- Educational requirements
- Work-life balance
- Job security, stability, and flexibility
- Work environment and industry culture
For example, a student interested in healthcare might weigh the pros and cons of becoming a nurse, physician, or medical technician by considering the length and cost of each role’s education requirements, typical work environments, and their ability to handle emotionally challenging situations.
Career evaluation activities
Each of these activities can be part of a student’s career evaluation:
- Informational interviews
- Pros and cons analyses
- Job shadowing
- Career comparison projects
- Labor market research
How P2C supports career preperation
On the Job
P2C Math lessons include “on the job” and “step into the career” sections that connect each math assignment to a career.
For example, an Algebra I lesson on unit analysis explains how “a dental laboratory technician uses CAD (computer-aided design) to create a virtual model of a tooth”, then asks students to calculate how wide the tooth mold should appear on a computer screen given the tooth’s actual width.
“Devise a Plan” and “Walk through the Solutions” sub-sections then detail how students can solve the problem, just as a professional within the featured occupation would.
Through multiple lessons, students can begin to identify the types of math problems they enjoy solving most—and thus, which jobs they wish to pursue.
Clusters Matcher
P2C makes the National Career Clusters® Framework personal through its Knowledge Matcher, Skills Matcher, and Abilities Matcher. Students can complete these online activities in less than five minutes each and are then shown how closely their knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) align with each career cluster. By clicking on a cluster, students can see which specific KSA—such as clerical knowledge, time management skills, or speech clarity—they need to achieve a 100% match.
Comparing clusters, alongside their KSAs, can help students evaluate their best fits. Students can even compare precise occupations—with their descriptions, median wages, annual openings, education requirements, related interests and values, and more shown side by side— via the Career Comparison feature.
Labor Market Navigator
Labor market information, drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is integrated into every facet of the P2C experience. Students and educators can find timely, state-specific statistics for hundreds of occupations, including annual projected job openings, median wages, and education requirements.
Users can also sort by any of these factors, enabling them to discover careers that meet their salary aspirations and planned educational investment.
ROI Analyzer
Career explorers often ask, “is college worth it?” The ROI Analyzer helps answer.
Users simply search and pick a career, then select either private or public post- secondary education. The ROI Analyzer reveals the occupation’s estimated state- specific median wage, average-in state tuition, and total estimated educational investment, then calculates those factors to highlight how long it would take a student to recoup and pay back their investment.
Career preparation
Career preparation is akin to meal prep. Just as a home cook must catalog all their ingredients and develop a plan to shop for the missing items, career explorers must actively build the skills and knowledge they will need to achieve their career goals.
This stage of career exploration is about equipping students with the technical, industry-specific, and essential skills required for success in their chosen fields, while also helping them develop a clear and actionable plan for their continued academic and career pathway.
Through hands-on experiences, focused coursework, and guidance from mentors and educators, students gain the confidence and capabilities to turn their aspirations into reality.
Career preparation activities
Career preparation does not have to wait until college or other post-secondary training. Educators can help students prepare for their careers in high school through these activities:
- Internships and apprenticeships
- Resume workshops
- Mock interviews
- Portfolio development
- Entrepreneurship projects
- Soft skills training
- College and career planning sessions
How P2C supports career preparation
Build Your Skills
P2C Math lessons help students advance their skills connected to mathematical concepts and careers.
For example, a geometry lesson on parallel lines explains how welders might use properties of angle pairs formed by parallel lines and a transversal to verify that they’ve welded beams correctly. The lesson next explains essential geometry principles, along with the steps used to solve a welding problem.
Students are then given additional problems to build their skills, helping to prepare aspiring welders. The lesson also emphasizes how other workers, including farmers and mechanical engineers, need to master the same skills.
Employability Skills
Gaining employability skills should start with understanding what specific skills entail, how and when to use them, and how to continually assess your skills. P2C supports this journey through Employability Skills lessons—activities, reflections, and discussions designed for grades 9 through 12.
The lessons cover nine skill categories:
- Interpersonal skills
- Personal qualities
- Resource management
- Information use
- Communications skills
- Systems thinking
- Technology use
- Critical thinking
- Applied academic skills
- Financial Literacy lessons
No student is career-ready without knowing how to make informed financial decisions—choices that will enable them to build a stable career. P2C helps teachers integrate these skills into the classroom through more than 60 interactive lessons aligned with seven standards: earning, planning, saving, investing, spending, borrowing, and insurance.
Financial Literacy Lessons
No student is career-ready without knowing how to make informed financial decisions—choices that will enable them to build a stable career. P2C helps teachers integrate these skills into the classroom through more than 60 interactive lessons aligned with seven standards: earning, planning, saving, investing, spending, borrowing, and insurance.
My Files
P2C encourages students to not only gain essential workforce skills and complete workforce training but to also document evidence of their career readiness. “My Files” serves as an organizational tool—a space for students to curate and save their resumes, cover letters, letters of recommendation, application essays, portfolio projects, assessment results, and any other materials they choose.
Conclusion
Career exploration should not be a one-time-only event nor is it about forcing students down a prescribed path; when done well, career exploration continually equips students with the tools, knowledge, and confidence to discover and pursue custom journeys. By leveraging the four stages of career exploration—personal discovery, career awareness, career evaluation, and career preparation—educators can empower students to envision and seek fulfilling futures.
It may sound complicated, but career-connected learning tools make it easy for students and educators alike. It’s exactly why we built P2C: because when education becomes relevant, learners fully engage. Career exploration can be a transformative experience that skyrockets academic achievement and sets students up for sustained career fulfillment.
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