Careers: Life Skills Training
- Jump to Discovering Your Career
- Jump to Launch Your Career
Discovering Your Career
Summary
Discover Your Career is a career guide and workshop designed to
help Grade 9-12 learners make suitable and realistic subject and
career choices for the FET band. As a user of the book you would:
* Do a brain profile questionnaire which enables you to identify your
left brain or right brain dominance, and the kinds of career fields that
suit your brain profile.
* Do a personality questionnaire, which enables you to identify your
mix of personality types, and the kinds of career fields that suit your
personality.
* Explore more than 50 career fields, encompassing hundreds of
specific jobs, and discover which of these jobs suit your interests, your
workplace preferences and your work values.
* Narrow your career choices down to three options which match your
brain profile, personality and interests.
* Choose the subjects required and recommended in order to pursue
your chosen careers.
Problem
Every grade nine learner faces the hard task of choosing subjects to study from grade ten to grade twelve, and the even harder task of choosing a career for which those subjects are suited. Many Grade 9 learners struggle to make informed choices regarding their subjects because they have little idea of where their interests lie in terms of careers. However, in order to make a wise choice about a suitable career field, one needs a lot of knowledge about oneself.
Few schools have the luxury of vast career guidance resouces or a dedicated counsellor who can help learners systematically improve knowledge about them selves or about their best career options. So it should not be surprising that every year thousands of learners make inappropriate subject and career choices.
Even in affluent communities, where standardised testing is the
norm, many learners still struggle with their career choices.
Standardised testing:
* Costs R10000 or more per learner and takes approximately 8
hours
* Tends to be eurocentric and therefore unsuitable for use in non-
Euro contexts
* Often focuses on easy-to-measure, abstract abilities (such as
verbal and non-verbal reasoning) and neglects harder-to-measure
interests, personalities and values
* May only be administered by a qualified psychologist or
psychometrist
Therefore the challenge is to provide an affordable package which:
* any teacher can use it
* provides at least some of the guidance a career counsellor might
provide
* gives learners immediate and relevant self-knowledge which can
help them focus on appropriate career and subject choices
Solution
Discover Your Career is a career guide designed to help grade 9 learners make realistic subject choices for the FET phase of their education, and to help them match up their subject and career choices.
Discover Your Career was designed to take learners on an inward journey, stopping off to learn more about their interests and associated career fields, their personalities, their brain profiles and the world of work. At each stop on this journey, learners link their growing self knowledge to appropriate career fields.
Once learners complete the activities on their journey, they have a clearer sense of who they are, and are therefore able to make appropriate decisions about their future careers. This also enables them to make relevant and useful decisions regarding their subject choices.
The activities in Discover Your Career do not have to be administered and evaluated by a psychologist or psychometrist. They can be administered and evaluated by a teacher as part of a lesson in the context of a classroom. This makes effective use of both time and resources and ensures that every grade 9 learner can be given this much needed support and guidance.
To make its implementation more effective, Discover Your Career is
supplied with a teacher’s manual that includes:
* lesson planning and implementation strategies in line with OBE and
the principles of the RNCS
* classroom management strategies
* evaluation and assessment in respect of Life Skills, Learning
Outcomes and Assessment Standards
* extension and enrichment strategies, and
* ideas for networking and available support
Who is it for?
Discover Your Career is aimed primarily at grade 9 learners since it includes a section on subject choices. However, most of the book is relevant to learners from grade 9 through to grade 12. Even learners who have already made their subject choices will derive considerable value from this book’s activities, which are not duplicated in Launch Your Career (for grade 11 and 12 learners).
What is the content?
Discover Your Career includes the following sections:
Methodology used
Discover Your Career uses a distinct and unique methodology that demands continual interaction and participation from learners. For instance, in the section on interests, the career fields are presented in separate panels. Learners can tick one of three circles indicating their level of interest for each career fields. This combination of information with a simple choice to assess the information in some way encourages close engagement with the material.
Features and Benefits
Implementation Snapshots
Launch Your Career
Summary
Launch Your Career is a career guide and workshop designed to help Grade 11-12 learners make suitable and realistic career choices and prepare for their first years out of school.
Problem Statement
Learners in grades 11 and 12 face the difficult task of choosing what to do after they leave school. For many, tertiary study is a tantalising dream made inaccessible by their financial circumstances or academic readiness. Some face the difficulty of choosing between similar courses of study at different tertiary institutions. Others have to decide whether to postpone tertiary studies in order to get some worldly experience such as working locally or travelling overseas. Facing any one of these decisions is challenging. Facing a number of them without adequate guidance can be overwhelming.
Of course, the difficulties do not end with these decisions. Once out of school many young people struggle to adjust to the freedom and responsibility of the real world. While arriving late or turning in poorly- written work at school could result in punishment or poor grades, in the world of tertiary study or work the costs of disregarding acceptable norms is far more severe. A poorly written application letter usually results in an unsuccessful application, which in turn can mean the difference between getting a bursary to study and having to find work, or the difference between getting work and remaining unemployed.
Therefore the challenge is to provide grade 11 and 12 learners with
an affordable package which:
* any teacher can use
* provides at least some of the guidance a career counsellor might
provide
* covers basic lifeskills such as preparing a CV and writing application
and other letters
* gives learners immediate and relevant self-knowledge which can
help them focus on appropriate career, study and work choices
Solution
Launch Your Career is a career guide designed to prepare grade 11 and 12 learners for their first years out of school.
Launch Your Career was designed to take learners on a journey blasting off from a base of self knowledge and heading for the world outside of school, the world of tertiary studies and work. Along the way learners explore their abilities and skills, work values, interests, characteristics, career constraints and personality. They prepare their own CVs, explore seven different areas within the vast world of work, and realise that many common jobs appear in vastly different working worlds from accounting to airports, or from construction to communication.
Once learners complete the activities on their journey, they have a clearer sense of who they are, and are therefore able to make appropriate decisions about their future careers and study or work options.
Learners explore gap year options, funding options and places to study. They role-play career interviews with family, friends and others. They role-play being interviewed for a job, and prepare for a job- shadowing opportunity.
Launch Your Career also encourages learners to consider creating their own jobs through entrepreneurial initiative.
The activities in Launch Your Career do not have to be administered and evaluated by a psychologist or psychometrist. They can be administered and evaluated by a teacher as part of a lesson in the context of a classroom. This makes effective use of both time and resources and ensures that every grade 11 or 12 learner can be given this much needed support and guidance.
To make its implementation more effective, Launch Your Career is
supplied with a teacher’s manual that includes:
* lesson planning and implementation strategies in line with OBE and
the principles of the RNCS
* classroom management strategies
* evaluation and assessment in respect of Life Skills, Learning
Outcomes and Assessment Standards
* extension and enrichment strategies, and
* ideas for networking and available support
Who is it for?
Launch Your Career is aimed primarily at grade 11 and 12 learners. Ideally, this workbook should be used as a follow-up to Discover Your Career. While these workbooks can be used independently, they were designed to complement one-another, providing a richly insightful experience for every learner.
What is the content?
Launch Your Career includes the following sections:
Methodology used
Launch Your Career uses a distinct and unique methodology that demands continual interaction and participation from learners. In each section, information that might ordinarily be presented in the form of a long prose article is broken into distinct ideas, each of which is presented in it’s own panel, which the reader is invited to assess. This encourages rich engagement with the material rather than out of focus, cursory skimming, which can easily happen with inert, academic material.
Features and Benefits
Implementation Snapshots
