Welcome to the Career Exploration Series, where we are taking a deeper dive into the forms career exploration can take across grade school. In Part 1, we took a closer look at some of the types of career exploration we can engage in at school, and in Part 2, we are taking a closer look at some career exploration lessons.

In Part 1, we broke down career exploration into some smaller categories, and specific lessons do not always fit neatly into one or the other! Some career exploration activities might meet multiple goals at once! A career fair, for example, might allow a student to identify a career of interest, explore that career in a low-commitment way, find out the requirements for pursuing that career, and, in some cases, maybe even apply for work or an internship. 

Other activities might be more narrowly tailored to a specific goal, like practicing filling out job applications to explore the process of applying for a job. So let’s dive into some potential lessons and where they might apply!

Career surveys might understandably evoke some mixed feelings. After all, it can already feel difficult to accurately answer multiple choice questions about subjective topics, and it can be discouraging when a student who has one idea of what they want is told by a survey that they might be better suited to another thing. 

But career surveys can also be a helpful way to apply some structure to the broad abstract world of career exploration and offer students a helpful starting point.

 Even students who disagree with their own assessment can sometimes more easily identify what they do want after identifying why they don’t want the outcome suggested by the survey. Career surveys are an excellent starting point for identifying careers of interest!

One crucial component of career exploration is not just helping students land on a career that immediately appeals to them, but to be able to weigh the pros and cons of a variety of career options and choose the ones that are best for them. 

One great lesson that offers an opportunity to identify careers of interest and do some low-commitment exploration of different job types is creating pro and con lists for a variety of jobs, where the pros and cons are solely based on how the student feels about the job based on what they have learned. 

These lists can help set the tone that students should be approaching potential careers with consideration for whether that job feels right to them (as opposed to anyone else). They also offer a baseline that students can engage in early and revisit later when they are taking a closer look at meeting the requirements to pursue the careers they are interested in or deciding what on-the-job learning opportunities might be most worthwhile.

One reality of career exploration is that we don’t always have the opportunity to engage in real on the job learning, and even when we do, it might not be at a frequency that is ideal for supporting a student’s long term goals. 

Simulated work experiences might not be a perfect replacement for the real thing, but they can still help with developing some of the skills associated with a particular job or career while also offering a form of on-the-job learning and low-commitment exploration. 

Simulated work experiences can vary from replicating a specific workplace to creating your own class business featuring jobs relevant to your students’ interests and goals.

One way we can explore the process of meeting the requirements for a type of career and of applying for work, all while developing a strategy for pursuing a specific job in the future, then building a career readiness plan is a great starting point! 

Students can identify which career or careers represent their highest priority and build a readiness plan based on the steps they will need to take before they can reasonably expect to be eligible for a job in the career they want. For some students, that might entail a specific postsecondary education plan, while for others it might entail practicing filling out applications and building an entry level resume for when they graduate high school. 

The important thing is that students have an opportunity to begin to plan for what their intended career might entail and also to be able to evaluate, as they go, whether it is a process they are truly interested in pursuing or whether they may decide to explore other options. So when your students have a good idea of the types of careers they might want, consider how a career readiness plan might be adjusted to meet their needs!

We hope this post has offered some helpful starting points for different stages of career exploration to meet your students wherever their needs may fall. If you would like to share your own experience teaching career exploration or want to hear about more lessons, then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and stay tuned for Part 3, where we will be focusing on teaching about soft skills!