Yes, You Can Support Student Career Readiness

Background


On December 5, I attended the 2018 Counselor Conference hosted by the San Diego and Imperial Counties Regional Consortium at the San Diego Sheraton Hotel & Marina. In addition to interning at the high school level this year where it is imperative to help students understand college and other training options as career pathways, I am a strong advocate for providing each student with planned career exploration activities throughout their K-12 education, not just in high school. I signed up to attend this specific conference because I knew their focus on career exploration would help me gather information and materials for designing career interventions at my fieldwork site and the future schools I will work at.

General Session Knowledge 

The first session I attended was “Yes, You Can Support Student Career Readiness,” delivered by John Merris-Coots, a representative from the California Department of Education’s Career Resource Network. The California Career Resource Network, or Cal CRN, is an initiative from the California Department of Education to monitor economic growth and needed careers across the state and provide this information to the next generation of workers. This website has several online tools to help students explore and plan their potential careers including search engines that provide information on more than 900 occupations, career interests surveys, and resources for parents and guardians as well.

Counseling Intervention Techniques
The Cal CRN is a multifaceted tool that students can benefit from in schools and at home. The resources on this website would be best used when delivering core curriculum and when doing post-high school individual planning with students. In a classroom setting, I would use the free lesson plans provided on the website to teach career attitudes, skills, and knowledge to students. These detailed lesson plans, designed for for 5th-12th grade classes, include the objectives, materials, and directions for activities school counselors would need to implement. Additionally, each lesson is connected with relevant California common core standards, English language development standards, and ASCA mindsets and behavior standards, making it easier for school counselors to develop annual core curriculum action plans as part of comprehensive school counseling programs that address career readiness for each student.

Individual tools such as the Career Surfer mobile app can help school counselors work with students individually and give students ways to further their own learning outside of meeting with the counselors. The Career Surfer app divides potential careers into 23 fields. Within each section for a field is listed a variety of positions. Here, students can learn about the tasks, preparation, description, and average annual salary. They can also watch a video that describes the position and what it's like to do everyday. This tool would probably be most helpful when working with high school students who are interested in a field but unsure of what their options are. School counselors could use this tool to assist individual students in developing a career plan that considers how much education they need, their potential income, and their daily work style.



Evidenced Based or Not
The Cal CRN resources are shaped by Holland’s Personality and Super's Stages of Growth/ Self Concept theories. Some of the assessments use students interests to identify their strongest combination of traits according to Holland’s six personality types. Many lessons focused on the exploration of student’s personalities and skills show students potential careers they could have according to their strongest traits as well. Since the pre-designed lessons focus first on exploration in earlier grades and then on gaining experience with career skills in later grades, the Cal CRN also supports K-12 career readiness according to Super’s stages of growth.This resource, strongly founded on known career theories and standards within the school counseling field, acknowledges that students need time to simply learn about careers and develop general applicable skills in academic spaces before practicing specific things like resume building, professional writing, and searching for jobs within a student’s target field.

Mr. Merris-Coots openly admitted that the Cal CRN does not currently have strategies of collecting data about their resources use and impact. This resource is one that any school counselor could use and implement in various ways. Although these lessons are not evidence based, school counselors can measure their effectiveness at their schools using pre and post tests for core curriculum lessons. Designing pre and post tests will allow school counselors to know which attitudes, knowledge, and skills we want students to learn in each lesson, and if delivered well, will collect information showing school counselors what their students have actually learned after a lesson and unit. Unfortunately, using the Cal CRN with individual students and their families will be more difficult to collect data on, but it is not impossible. School counselors can use pre and post tests to collect data for parent meetings or workshops related to the career domain and we can also track our school’s college and career readiness using tools such as the California Dashboard.

Further Considerations
As school counselors, we should consider why we want to and how we will implement the Cal CRN in our schools. If we plan to develop the lesson plans and include them in our core curriculum, theses lesson should be described in our core curriculum action plans submitted at the beginning of the school year. This will give school counselors opportunities to negotiate for the amount time they will need in classrooms throughout the year and design their small groups from general needs presented from reviewing data.

I believe the Cal CRN can be useful in other ways as well. School counselors can add a career piece to each of their 4 year planning individual meetings with students, helping them translate their career assessments and planning their moves towards a fulfilling career. For middle school and high school counselors working with students in grades 6-10, this could look like discussing CTE pathways and California community college opportunities that result in skill development and certifications for a professional field students are interested in. This could also look like exploring internship and job options with students that give them opportunities to learn more about the fields they are interested in. To better assist this process, it would help if school counselors build relationships with business and organizations located close to their schools by planning field trips and internship arrangements, developing smooth avenues for their students to gain professional experience. Information about the world of work, identifying your skills and preferred work environment, and applying this knowledge to a career search can also be delivered to parents through workshops and meetings. Collaborating with your school’s PTA and similar organizations allow school counselors to bring more attention to the services they provide and deliver them to as many families as possible in their schools.


By using a free statewide resource that students, parents. teachers and administrators can also explore for themselves, school counselors can implement the Cal CRN in equitable and measurable ways.


Additional Resources

The Cal CRN: http://www.californiacareers.info/

O*net Online: https://www.onetonline.org/

Career Coach: https://ccc.emsicc.com/?radius=&region=California

Written by: Cynthia Jackson, SDSU School Counseling Graduate Student, Mira Mesa High School Counseling Intern