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With steady advancements in science and technology, it may not be possible to accurately predict what kind of jobs will exist when today’s students will enter the workforce. But we know for sure they’ll need a wide range of diversified skills.

The need for employers will most likely change significantly, which will essentially reshape the job market. And such shifts will present unique challenges if students don’t make well-informed career choices today.

Whether you’re a teacher, counselor, or parent, now you must be thinking ‘how to help these students make the right choices about their future career paths?’ The simplest and most effective answer is to use a career path selection tool for K-12 students.

Lots of students choose a career path without knowing what exactly it offers and whether or not it matches their interests. Perhaps, the biggest reason behind this is a lack of exposure to different career paths. Without having proper knowledge, students cannot aspire to pursue their preferred career paths.

Despite the necessity, teachers, counselors, and parents often fail to expose students to different career pathways. Parents remain busy with the professions while teachers and counselors spend all of their time to engaging students in standardized assessments and existing curricula.

In this situation, only the introduction of a career path selection tool for K-12 students can help to guide them toward the right direction.

If you’re still feeling hesitant about whether or not you should introduce the students to such a tool, keep on reading and you’ll find it out yourself. In this post, we’ve rounded up the invaluable benefits of using a career path selection tool for K-12 students to help you make an informed decision.

1- Early Exposure to Career Options

Introducing students early, especially in grades K-8, to a diverse range of career options is essentially the first step to help them make the right decision about careers. In fact, this is the key reason why this trend is gaining huge traction these days with a huge number of school districts encouraging career exploration for younger students.

With younger students spending most of their time in formal education, they don’t get any option of having real exposure to the professional world before they reach their 20s. A career path selection tool for K-12 students can help them bridge this gap between curricula and career by providing them with opportunities for career exploration. By helping students understand the actual relevance between their curricula and future careers, such tools motivate them to remain engaged and strive for success.

Here’re some effective steps that you may want to follow to help establish a solid foundation for younger students. Some of these steps can be fully taken care of by the career path selection tool for K-12 students you’re using while some others may need a little involvement from your side.

• 1.1- Identifying Their True Interests and Passions

What might be the most effective choice for one student may not be ideal for another one. And that’s exactly where the importance of identifying a student’s values, likes, and dislikes comes into the picture. While a career path selection tool for K-12 students does the majority of tasks in this context, you, as a parent, teacher, or counselor, also need to do your bit.

• 1.2- Exploring Future Professional Options

Depending on the interests and passions of students, you need to inform them about the prospects of each career path and its present and future trends. While you can access a lot of resources available on the Internet, you may not be able to associate their interests with the ideal career paths. Here as well, your career path selection tool for K-12 students can prove to be extremely useful. Such tools use advanced technologies to match students’ interests with career paths that are best suited for them.

While finalizing a particular option at this stage might be too early, there’s no harm in letting students know of the career paths that they can pursue in the future.

• 1.3- Encouraging Them for Self-Evaluation

This is perhaps the biggest reason for using a career path selection tool for K-12 students. While you might have a clear idea of a student’s likes and dislikes, doing a proper evaluation is simply a must to make the entire process more accurate. A career path selection tool for K-12 students performs a thorough analysis of students’ interests, abilities, personality, aptitude, and weaknesses. This helps to build the perfect foundation, based on which students can proceed with their career planning.

• 1.4- Helping Them Find Out More about Particular Professions

This responsibility mostly lies with teachers, counselors, and parents. When you observe a particular student is showing interests in a particular career path, it’s time to help him/her test the water. The process could involve volunteering at different events, attending community events, visiting career fairs, etc. All these things will help the kid learn more about the career that he/she is planning to pursue in the future.

If possible, it’s also a wonderful idea to help students have real-life experience of the professions they seem interested in. For instance, students, who’re interested in software-related things, can be introduced to an IT professional, which will help them get the much-needed exposure to the IT field and what it entails.

In addition to these, you also need to ensure that students can reach out to you whenever they need any help. Therefore, it’s important to find out ways through which you can help them achieve their goals.

The best thing about early exposure to different career paths is students get enough time to learn about different fields thoroughly. This will eventually help them to embark on their career journey in a more confident manner.

Lastly, you, especially if you’re a parent, must not forget that your role is to support your child, not to decide. The only things you can do are guide and introduce him/her to different options while leaving the final choice up to the kid.

2- Offering a Holistic Approach to Help Students Prepare For College and Careers

To succeed in their lives, students need to have knowledge and master skills beyond those that core academic subjects cover. Institutions, teachers, and counselors not only need to focus on the students’ academic sides but offer a holistic approach as well. This will help to ensure that they reach their goals and become successful in life.

It’s important to understand that a holistic approach is different from simply providing the students with a plethora of disparate programs. To be able to provide a holistic approach, institutions need to integrate different support services into a personal and seamless experience for every student.

Here’re the best practices that you can follow to accomplish this goal. In the last block, we’ve already discussed how you can help students explore different career paths early using a career path selection tool for K-12 students. Therefore, though it’s one of the best practices, we won’t discuss it in this block.

• 2.1- Providing a Student-Centric Support

Students may need to seek help from different individuals – from mental health counselors and academic counselors to career advisors. However, when these individuals continue working in silos, it may lead to a disjointed student experience. To overcome this, institutions need to focus on creating cross-functional teams that not only offer a student-centric approach but help to increase the visibility of the support services across campus.

Through this approach, institutions can easily share knowledge across different departments, pool resources whenever required, and obtain a clear understanding of how their campus education and services are being experienced by the students.

• 2.2- Encouraging Students to Improve Life Skills

Of course, to obtain success in the modern workplace, it’s a must for students to develop applied and tactical skills. However, having a broad focus on developing life skills is equally important as well. While there’re different ways to accomplish this, here, we’ve jotted down the most effective ones.

• • Incorporating research-based projects and tasks into the teaching process is a useful method to help students improve life skills. With new information being discovered at a steadily increasing rate, the ability to research and analyze has become important than ever. Not only students need to understand how to discover accurate information but how to analyze its usefulness and reliability as well.
  • Preparing students to be able to collaborate with others is another important thing that institutions need to focus on. As the world is becoming increasingly connected and collaborative, it’s a must for today’s students to develop this skill. One effective way is to encourage students to work in groups when they perform problem-solving exercises.
  • Students will need to demonstrate openness and an ability to communicate with different ideas and cultures to work successfully in a collaborative community. To help develop these skills, students should have exposure to open discussions that can help them learn how to communicate with others comfortably. Some other effective ways include Q&A sessions with local employers, debating sessions, and school trips – all of which can help them learn real-life implications of these skills.
  • Unquestionably, tailoring the programs for every individual student may not be a feasible idea. However, institutions can try to pinpoint the elements that appeal to an individual student’s interests and strengths. Once these elements are identified, teachers and counselors can focus on them to tap into the natural curiosity of students.

Institutions also need to try different, meaningful ways when teaching these skills. This will help students absorb the knowledge obtained from the programs more conveniently. For instance, when students are trying to solve a problem, they can be asked how they’d approach a similar real-life scenario.

• 2.3- Using Data to Identify Students’ Needs

Leveraging the power of data and analytics can do wonders when it comes to providing students with a holistic approach. By doing this, institutions can find out students that require additional support and connect them to academic and career opportunities. It not only helps students make better career decisions but improves the likelihood that their future careers remain aligned with the requirements of the job market. Additionally, institutions can also decide on what kinds of academic programs they should focus on.

Apart from these, institutions should also try to offer unifying experiences to their students. It means institutions need to focus on activities that can attract a broad range of diverse interests and create programs where all students can actively participate. This can benefit institutions in two ways. First, these kinds of programs help to ensure the students remain more engaged, and second, they help to create a cohesive group.

3- Orientation of School Accountability Systems

Through school accountability systems, schools and districts give accounts of their progress in relation to raising student achievement for every student. These help policymakers at different levels monitor the performance of schools and districts and act as necessary – providing supports and resources for schools and districts that are struggling and recognizing or rewarding those that are high-performing.

In simple words, the key objective of school accountability systems is improving learning for all students. Accountability should follow a collective responsibility of teachers and administrators and should have different measures including student outcomes, among others.

While schools strive to strengthen their capacity to help all students reach high standards, they should also try to promote student accountability, especially when distance learning has become more prevalent than ever.

Here’re some effective strategies that schools, as well as, you, as a teacher or counselor can follow to motivate students for taking responsibility for their learning.

• 3.1- Creating the Right Learning Environment

Establishing an appropriate learning environment, which encompasses trust and responsibility, is the cornerstone of student accountability. Such an environment helps students learn how to understand and deal with their emotions successfully, and set and attain positive goals.

When students understand that their actions can trigger consequences, they tend to assume responsibility for their learning and behavior. Therefore, it’s a must for you to develop an environment where students feel that they’re welcome, accepted, and supported, which will eventually keep them more engaged in learning activities.

• 3.2- Defining Clear Expectations and Setting High Standards

When it comes to remote teaching, it’s essential to let the students know what you expect them to achieve. You also need to do attendance check-ins daily at a fixed time and define due dates for assignments.

Of course, you must be available whenever they need your guidance. While methods may vary – from inviting questions to setting virtual office hours, the objective needs to be helping them succeed. Most importantly, you need to help them understand that they can achieve high standards despite facing significant obstacles.

• 3.3- Allowing Students to Give Voice to the Learning Process

Students should be allowed to give voice to the learning process, which often improves student accountability. For example, asking them about different ways that can be taken to improve distance learning can help students feel more responsible for the process. In fact, a student-centered approach can lead to increased student achievement, according to a Stanford study.

To accomplish this, you can use an online survey tool to gather the opinions and feedbacks from your students. You can figure out the most effective plans to support students based on survey responses.

• 3.4- Teaching Students Self-Assess Their Progress

In a distance learning environment, students should be given clear directions on how they can assess their progress. It essentially helps them assume responsibility for what they’re learning. As students assess their work and progress and develop strategies for more learning, it leads to improved performance.

To implement this strategy successfully, you must set clear expectations and offer students methods to assess their work regularly. This strategy becomes particularly useful when students are assigned large, complex projects. They can track their progress regularly and see whether or not they’ve fulfilled the criteria required to complete the project successfully.

• 3.5- Encouraging Family Involvement

Parents and guardians often have a considerable impact on their children’s learning when they remain updated about activities, schedules, and expectations. Students also tend to become more responsible for their learning and try hard to stay on track.

To encourage family involvement, you can communicate with parents/guardians directly. For instance, you can think of scheduling weekly video conferences where they can ask questions about their children’s learning and progress.

There’re many online tools available out there that can help you accomplish this task. You can also use tools that let parents get involved in their children’s learning process by sending notifications on assignments, attendance, grades, etc.

Schools also need to recognize that we’re heading toward an increasingly digital and interconnected world. The curricula and programs need to be modernized to help students handle the 21^st century’s imperatives successfully. They should also keep on looking around the world constantly for global best practices and use benchmarking as a method to improve their own systems.

Lastly, in these difficult times, the role of high-quality teachers and counselors cannot be understated. Regardless of the reform strategy schools try to pursue, ultimately the quality of the education system depends on the quality of the teachers and counselors.

Therefore, it has become imperative for schools to attract and retain stronger leadership. Generally, high-performing schools focus more on recruiting and preparing high-quality teachers and other educators, which greatly helps in improving student performance.

4- Why Should You Choose CounselHero?

When it comes to preparing students for career, college, and life, it’s a must to help them realize their true talents and the unique value they can add to their workplace and society. And that’s exactly what our career path selection tool for K-12 students does.

At CounselHero, we believe that every student must be allowed to follow his/her own path and their decisions must not be affected by the opinions of other people. That’s why we’ve developed this career path selection tool for K-12 students that students can use to choose career paths according to their strengths, weaknesses, dreams, and ambitions.

They need to start with features that help them discover themselves through short, engaging, interesting, and fun assignments. Once a student completes the process and identifies a career path that looks appealing to him/her, he/she can navigate the curriculum with the school counselor. With the guidance and help of the school counselors, students can participate in as many career experiences as possible by the time they become high school seniors.

These may include internships, college visits, career field trips, job shadows, etc. And the best thing about our platform is that it comes with a virtual option for all these experiences. Therefore, even if the school districts or students don’t have the resources to participate in them in real life, they can avail of the virtual option and get benefitted from the experiences.

Our platform has only one core objective – to enable students to make the most informed decisions about their careers and lives after high school.

We also understand that while it’s always great to have a career plan early in life, things happen and plans may get changed. This is the reason our platform has a built-in library that offers a huge amount of information on many different career paths. This helps us ensure that if a student wants to move in a different direction even after choosing a career path initially, he/she gets access to all the information required to make an informed decision on the new path.

Alongside all these, we also provide the students with an introduction to financial literacy. It helps them assess the return on investment pertaining to different career paths before they finalize a particular one.

It’s an unfortunate fact that lots of students don’t have financial literacy and as a result, they often take out more money in the form of student debt than they actually need. Unpaid student debt may impact many areas of a person’s life down the line.

Therefore, it’s extremely important to borrow as minimum as possible while matching the loan to the expenses. Our platform, through promoting financial literacy, helps to ensure that students develop money management skills right from the beginning of their journey and plan well before they take out a student loan.