Welcome back to the Career Exploration Series, where we are taking a closer look at the ways we can teach and learn about career exploration across grade school and a variety of readiness levels. 

In Part 1, we talked about some broader categories of career exploration, while in Part 2, we looked at some specific lessons associated with career exploration. In Part 3, we are pivoting our focus to soft skills and how to teach them in a career exploration context.

Let’s get started by drawing a line between lessons that just happen to relate to a particular soft skill and those that approach soft skills from a career exploration perspective. For our purposes, the term “career exploration” applies when we are consciously connecting a given soft skill to how it might help us succeed in future careers. 

Let’s also draw a line between soft skills and hard skills, which we will discuss in Part 4. Whereas hard skills are learned for the purpose of a specific job or career and are not often transferable to other types of work, soft skills are more generalized skills that apply across a wide variety of jobs.

With that in mind, let’s dive in!

One great way to add a career exploration twist to an otherwise unrelated lesson is to sometimes take a moment to name the soft skills that students are working on in relation to that lesson and some of the ways those skills can be beneficial across a variety of work settings. 

This does not mean career exploration needs to be the central focus of every lesson! Rather, many lessons offer an opportunity to take a moment to do some critical thinking as to how they apply to a variety of potential careers or one particular career of interest. 

Students doing class presentations, for example, might think about when a presentation would be applicable to the career they are most interested in, and how working on presentation skills might help them advance toward their own career goals. 

Alternatively, students might brainstorm and find that doing presentations is important for a huge variety of jobs, and even if they aren’t sure what job they want, it might still be a helpful skill to learn, regardless.

Much like we can connect activities that are not directly about career exploration but include soft skills into a career exploration conversation, we can also identify a variety of ways to practice the soft skills we actively identify as being important to a career. 

For example, students may well recognize the importance of being able to read and write good emails, but are not likely to want to spend all their reading and writing practice time engaging with emails. While there is some benefit to focusing on specific types of communication in some situations, one of the great benefits of soft skills is that they are broadly applicable, and a variety of practice styles can still benefit us across a variety of settings. 

If students prefer to practice writing in their journal, for example, or to practice reading with their favorite fantasy novel, it might not always be the exact thing we need to work on but it is always an option for students looking to find ways to consciously and sustainably practice in the long term.

If you are able to recruit members of the community to come speak to your class or have the opportunity to visit a workplace, it presents a great opportunity to show how soft skills can be applicable across a wide variety of jobs and even in cases we might not expect! 

The manager of a grocery store, for example, might explain how she has to use lots of different forms of communication to effectively do her job and regularly needs to write clear reports to her regional manager. A firefighter might talk about how he has to know how to talk clearly to people who are in a high-stress situation. 

Hearing a professional tell stories about the way their own soft skills have impacted their work experience can be an incredibly helpful way to connect a variety of skills with potential on the job applications.

Team projects are nothing new at school, and good communication is often an important component of successful group projects. But how often do we focus on our communication methods in a project context? 

When focusing on soft skills in the context of career exploration, setting aside time as part of team projects to focus on team communication can be a valuable way of teaching an important soft skill that applies to the vast majority of jobs! 

Teams can work on communication activities like establishing shared values, creating a mutually agreed-upon work schedule, or even completing a timed activity together with direct verbal communication. 

The important thing is emphasizing the value of group communication as a skill that can be practiced in its own right and applies to a wide variety of jobs.

We hope this post has offered some ideas on how to incorporate career exploration-oriented teaching about soft skills and how to draw connections between your career-focused curriculum and your everyday curriculum. If you would like to share your own experience teaching about soft skills, then we would love to hear from you at hello@autismgrownup.com. Otherwise, stay tuned for Part 4, where we will be taking a closer look at teaching hard skills.