Workplace skills that are not specific to one career are often called soft skills or transferable skills. These are the skills that you would need to navigate most workplaces.  In this lesson, you will begin by recording your current use of transferable skills in your part-time job, volunteer, extra curricular, hobbies, and/or classroom activities and will identify the importance of these skills in your future career. Once you’ve reflected upon your current use of a few key transferable skills, you will then update the skills included in your About Me profile.

Even if you’re not sure you’ll be heading to a technical college or four-year college or university your first year after high school, you never know where your future career will  take  you.  It  may be later in your career that you decide that additional education is necessary to advance you in your field.  So why not start thinking about potential schools that  would make a good fit for you?  In this activity, you’ll explore schools in Xello to help you identify factors that you feel are important in your postsecondary education goals, saving at least 3 schools and identifying the factors that influenced your selections. 

In this Xello interactive lesson, you’ll explore your feelings about post-secondary education and will rank the factors that are most important to you when selecting technical or 4-year colleges/universities that are a good fit for you.  You will rank these factors and will compare how the colleges that you have saved in your profile stack up to what you feel is most important.  

In preparation for opportunities to network and interview for jobs, it is important to prepare a brief summary of yourself relevant to your experiences, interests, and short and long term career goals.  This summary is often referred to as an “elevator pitch.”  Creating an elevator pitch is useful for every post secondary plan and can be used when talking with employers and military recruiters, and it can a framework for a more detailed personal statement often used on a college or scholarship application!  

Knowing how to budget your money is important for your financial security, ensuring you can pay basic living expenses like food & clothing, rent or mortgage payments, transportation, tuition, insurance, and have money left for entertainment. Budgeting is a proactive approach to organizing your money.  Budgeting ensures you're not spending more than you're making, allowing you to plan for short- and long-term expenses AND help you make a plan to save for larger future purchases that support your lifestyle goals!  You simply want to be able to track your income left over after all expenses to ensure you're not falling into debt.

In case you aren’t familiar with the term, an entrepreneur is a person who organizes and operates their own business. In this lesson, you will identify the skills and characteristics that make entrepreneurs successful, investigate paths to becoming an entrepreneur (e.g. starting your own business, buying a franchise, etc.). You will also explore characteristics and skills that you’ve developed that demonstrate your entrepreneurial spirit!

In this Xello interactive lesson, you will identify the skills and characteristics that make entrepreneurs successful,  investigate paths to becoming an entrepreneur, and explore the benefits and challenges of  becoming an entrepreneur.

Even when you are doing a job which you don’t intend to stay in forever, you’re building your employability skills. Employability skills are those skills which are transferable to other careers and which may help you to advance in your career. These could be academic skills like communication and basic math skills, or they may be personal characteristics such as critical thinking skills, promptness, and adaptability. In this 8th grade Job Skills lesson, students will investigate the skills and personal characteristics which are transferable from one occupation to another.

This is the newly-revised Energy RCP template. Districts interested in adopting and customizing this template for district use should contact their regional career pathway coordinator for more information.

Students will be using real-life energy use data to learn how to use spreadsheets and create graphs to better organize and view data. Discussions can then follow to analyze the data and explain the usage. Real rates are then provided, and students can use the electricity consumed data to create a utility bill for the consumer and compare the standard Residential Service charges to if the member were instead billed by the “Time of Use” rate.

Use this Community of Practice presentation to connect with career readiness resources your district can use with administrators and school boards.

Use this Community of Practice presentation to explore best practices in engaging with your community and higher education partners through the ACP process.

Career and technical education (CTE) programs are increasingly engaging a broad range of stakeholders, including parents and community organizations, to improve CTE programs, better serve students and help communities in need. This resource will focus on ways that CTE educators can communicate with, collaborate with and support current and prospective learners’ families and communities, particularly for learners and communities who have been historically underserved. This publication describes general strategies for engaging these stakeholders, more specific strategies aimed at breaking down barriers to engagement for particular special and underserved population groups, and examples of CTE and career development programs doing promising work in this area.

Use this Community of Practice presentation to explore resources and powerful practices to engage your students in the Career Readiness initiative and in Xello activities.

Students will choose an engineering sub-discipline of their choice and present information about it to their peers in a presentation style of their choice. The presentation must include some type of multimedia format (Powerpoint, Prezi, Slides, Keynote, etc.)

All careers rely on English-related skills like reading, writing, speaking and listening. Specifically English-related careers can also be found in the following Career Cluster Chart.

These two Quick Listens are from Episode 22 in Season 2 of the Lessons in Adolescence podcast. Listen to more where ever you get your podcast or online at: https://education.virginia.edu/faculty-research/centers-labs-projects/youth-nex/remaking-middle-school/youth-nex-rms-podcast-page

This episode features a conversation with three authors of “Career Exploration in the Middle Grades: A Playbook for Educators,” which was developed in partnership between the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) and American Student Assistance (ASA). Stephanie Simpson is CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based AMLE, which represents tens of thousands of middle level educators across the country and offers a variety of resources, training and convenings for the field. Ashley Hemmy is manager of program engagement at Boston-based ASA, a 60 year-old national nonprofit and student loan guarantor organization which has expanded its mission to develop and invest in resources and tools to help students as early as middle school to explore their long-term career and educational goals. Julie DiPilato is a seventh grade science teacher in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where she developed an array of career exploration programming in her school.

Stephanie, Ashley, Julie and Jason talk about the career exploration playbook, how it came about, why career exploration is a perfect match for young adolescents and where it fits within schools. They then paint a picture of what career exploration looks like in the middle grades, how educators can use it to enhance their teaching, the ways AMLE and ASA are promoting the larger scale adoption of this practice, and the opportunities for career exploration in the field of education long-term.

This document addresses the CLNA and extends the detailed guidance previously provided by NAPE and our partners at Advance CTE and ACTE. The needs assessment process is the primary lever within Perkins V for educators to highlight factors limiting the success of marginalized communities and underrepresented student groups in CTE. The law requires that the results of the CLNA be included in the four-year Perkins V local application submitted to the state.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "access and equity?" Use this Community of Practice presentation to learn more about equity and how it impacts ACP in your district.

Addressing equity in the Academic and Career Planning (ACP) process goes beyond offering a
scope and sequence of ACP activities that are available to all students. It’s important that you
meet the needs of each learner. Every child will approach the ACP process differently and will
require an individualized level of support to be successful.

Therefore, it’s essential that school leaders responsible for implementing ACP explore equity
issues. The following are short activities that can help ACP or career readiness teams and leaders
encourage their own stakeholders to learn more about what equity means, how to explore who
they are, what beliefs and assumptions they hold, identify their values, and consider how all of this
can impact the learners and families they serve. The goal of each activity is to help educators learn
a little more about their students and themselves and to leave with one simple action step to
improve equity within their district.