Welcome back to our Career Exploration Series, where we have been taking a closer look at the forms that career exploration can take across grade school in preparation for the wide variety of jobs and careers a student might be interested in pursuing in adulthood. 

In Part 1, we took a closer look at some of the types of career exploration you might find across school settings. In Part 2, we looked at some more specific career exploration lessons. In Part 3, we focused on teaching about soft skills, and in Part 4, we are following up with an exploration of teaching about hard skills in a career exploration context.

We explored the difference between hard and soft skills in Part 3, and one key difference is that whereas soft skills might sometimes take some effort to connect to a career but be easier to incorporate into lessons, hard skills tend to be clearly assigned to a specific type of career, but also fall outside the realm of what you are able to teach. 

Even if we knew all the ins and outs of quantum mechanics and interior design, we would never have the time to teach the hard skills associated with each job to every student based on their individual interests.

So, how do we incorporate teaching about hard skills into our career exploration process, knowing that there are limitations on what we can teach about them? Let’s dive in and take a closer look!

While it may not be possible to teach the specific skills associated with a wide variety of hard skills, there are ways to incorporate foundational soft skills into learning with an eye toward learning certain hard skills at a time when that opportunity becomes available. 

In particular, it may be worth considering the types of executive functioning skills that could make it easier to learn the hard skills associated with a particular career or job. 

Some seeking to learn hard skills might benefit from a sophisticated working memory process, while others might hope to employ their stellar organizational strategies. If you find yourself stuck on how to approach a job that is heavily reliant on hard skills rather than soft skills most traditionally associated with careers, consider what executive functioning skills might help contribute to learning those skills more quickly and comprehensively.

One other option when facing the limitations associated with learning hard skills at a grade school level is to plan ahead and identify the times when students will be learning those hard skills directly, and what they might need to do to be able to access that resource. 

Do they need to get into a 4-year college? Could it be done at a community college or technical school? Is it a straightforward certification process? Learning the “how” can help put a timeline on acquiring the most essential skills for a given career and offer some guideposts for planning out the future and how to best make use of the time available. 

So if you are considering how best to proceed with a student eager to learn the hard skills associated with a specific career, consider what is needed to acquire those skills. You can even incorporate it into the career readiness plan from Part 2 of this series!

While there is a huge variety of hard skills out there and not all can be learned on the job, sometimes the best way to get a sense of what working on certain skills is like is to see professionals do it or to practice under professional supervision. 

Those are cases where visiting a workspace in the community, inviting professionals to the class to discuss their careers, or even going on an internship, may present an opportunity to learn about a hard skill that would otherwise be difficult to access or replicate in another setting. 

If the goal is working toward learning hard skills related to a particular job, sometimes the best bet (when possible) is to go straight to the professional!

We hope this series has offered some helpful starting points with any student you might be working with on career exploration, from those just starting out to those restarting, to those who know exactly what they want to do. 

If you would like to see us cover any part of this topic more in-depth, then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com, and we will see you next week with an all-new series!