Career Education and Guidance in New Zealand Schools

Integrating Career Education within the Curriculum

When career education is integrated into the curriculum, a rich and varied approach to learning about careers is promoted and subject content takes on greater relevance to students.

To integrate career education effectively, schools need to consider:

Teaching and learning opportunities

When teachers incorporate realistic and appropriate career contexts within the essential learning areas and make these links explicit to their students, they provide opportunities for the students to achieve the aims of career education and guidance. These aims support the development of the essential skills that students need in order to take their places successfully in the world.

For example, the career education outcomes related to decision making and planning will help students to develop their information-gathering, self-management, competitive, and work and study skills. Students develop these skills across the curriculum as they learn to gather, process, and evaluate information, to take increasing responsibility for their learning, to work both independently and in groups, and to self-monitor, self-evaluate, and set goals for themselves. They learn to "make career choices on the basis of realistic information and self-appraisal" (The New Zealand Curriculum Framework).

While regular classroom programmes provide the richest teaching and learning opportunities for career education and guidance, schools also need to take advantage of opportunities that key transition points create, for example, when students:

• enrol at school;
• move from one school to another;
• make their subject-option choices;
• fill out school career surveys;
• fill in course or programme evaluations;
• enter for external qualifications;
• receive qualification results or their records of learning;
• consider tertiary and training choices and the criteria for them;
• leave school.

Each school needs to decide how best to integrate career education in relation to its students' needs and the nature of its community, using a variety of approaches. As students progress, the methods schools use to provide career education should adapt to meet changing requirements - moving from an integrated approach to one that can address individual students' particular needs.

Years 1-6 At primary school, students need to develop their self-awareness, awareness of opportunities, and abilities to make decisions, plan, and take action as a normal part of regular classroom programmes.

Years 7-8 At upper primary and intermediate school, students increase their knowledge and understanding of themselves as well as their awareness of opportunities, their decision-making and planning skills, and their ability to take action. They also begin to develop transferable skills in research and goal setting. Career education should be integrated into regular classroom programmes in the essential learning areas (for example, a social studies unit on the changing nature of work or a technology unit on how a specific technology has impacted on the world of work).

Years 9-10 As they enter secondary education, students continue to build their understanding of themselves and their opportunities, with a greater emphasis on how occupations fit with their own strengths, interests, and values.

Their career education needs become more personalised, and they need to develop sound skills in planning, decision making, and taking action so that they can make informed and appropriate subject choices.

Classroom teachers can best help their students to achieve this by:

• incorporating career education into programmes across the curriculum as a regular part of learning;
• making the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required in particular careers explicit to the students;
• encouraging the students to evaluate their own skills, knowledge, and attitudes.

Years 11-13+ Many opportunities for career education and guidance occur during these years. Students will be developing clear ideas of their career goals along with the skills to make realistic career decisions and plans. They can be encouraged to take a number of steps, including researching opportunities, writing a curriculum vitae, completing applications for courses and jobs, gaining work experience, practising interviews, and making decisions on future work or study opportunities. Students have access to a wide range of achievement and unit standards, so it is important to help them to choose those that allow progress in their areas of career interest and in the skills and attitudes they will need for the world of work and further learning.

Career education programmes should also be supported by career information in an accessible form that is appropriate for young people of different ages, abilities, and ethnic backgrounds.

Schools also need to consider the range of people who may provide career education and guidance, including:

• classroom or subject teachers;
• form or home group teachers;
• deans, heads of department or faculty, house or whānau leaders, and school counsellors;
• career education leaders;
• peers, student mentors, and role models;
• resource teachers: learning and behaviour;
• parents or guardians and whānau support groups;
• community leaders and mentors, such as kaumātua, kuia, and church ministers;
• industry mentors and role models.

Schools could gather further ideas about providing career education and guidance by:

• networking with other schools;
• contacting School Support Services and Career Services rapuara (www.careers.govt.nz) for information on the services they offer in planning and delivery;
• joining a professional career association and participating in regional meetings and conferences;
• visiting www.tki.org.nz;
• visiting www.ero.govt.nz for reports on school programmes (for example, see Education Review Office, 1999).

Examples of career education experiences

Integrated within the curriculum

English

• Produce expressive or personal writing about career experiences, such as work experience or workplace visits.
• Undertake transactional writing, such as developing a curriculum vitae or a covering letter for a job application.
• Present a role play, a video, an audiotape, or a computer-projected display about working in an industry described in a text the students have read, heard, or viewed.
• Speak about careers (for example, debating with a careers focus or interviewing someone about a career, such as a writer, a character in a text, or a family member).
• Investigate an industry or career and gather and process the information for an oral presentation to the class, using a variety of presentation methods.
• Process information using a range of appropriate technologies to increase awareness of opportunities for career pathways through life; present a report describing the findings; and evaluate the research process.

Health and physical education

• Learn about environments that best enable people to learn and work and how we can develop these.
• Experience class visits, listen to speakers, or undertake purposeful research with a focus on community-based health services, looking at the range of occupations required to meet community health needs and the skills, qualifications, and experience needed for those occupations.
• Investigate health and safety legislation, or legislation, policies, and practices that relate to stereotyping, discrimination, and harassment.
• Investigate inclusion issues that affect minority groups (for example, new migrants, refugees, or people with disabilities).

The arts

• Experience visits from performing and visual artists in order to become aware of career possibilities and to encounter role models who have made careers within the arts field.
• Be mentored by people working in creative industries.
• Combine trips to view performances or exhibitions with research on career opportunities and pathways.
• When participating in school productions or exhibitions, reflect on individual interests and skills and share observations about career opportunities in the arts.
• Use a careers theme when writing a dramatic piece for radio, television, or stage, choreographing a dance, writing a musical score, or creating a visual art work.

Social studies

• Identify and show how the cultural identity of three New Zealanders has influenced their career choices and actions.
• Gather data to identify the aspirations of family members or a school group. Through research, develop a possible career path for one of these members and show the skills needed and the decisions that the individual might need to make along the way.
• Research a range of occupations within two organisations (similar or different). Identify the roles and responsibilities for each occupation and compare them, giving possible reasons for any differences.
• Interview a range of high-profile people in the community. Identify the reasons for their choice of career and the challenges that have arisen from that choice. State possible future changes in direction.
• Identify an organisation and demonstrate how the past management or leadership structure is different to the current structure.

Learning languages

• Gain knowledge of potential career possibilities in the area of language, within New Zealand and internationally, through class visits, speakers who provide role models, and focused research.
• Investigate and report on careers in which knowledge of other languages is an essential tool that assists communication in different settings and that provide a social, political, or economic advantage.
• Use appropriate technologies to ask speakers of a language new to the students about career pathways and provide oral or written commentaries, in the new language, about the resulting information.
• Use career themes in oral and written work as particular topics are explored and new language is learned.

• Solve everyday mathematical problems from a range of careers.
• Identify the use of mathematics knowledge and skills in a range of careers.
• Explore the use of number operations and geometrical concepts in a range of careers through the medium of information and communications technologies.
• Graph and interpret local labour market information (for example, changes in the numbers in the workforce, in levels of unemployment, and in qualifications of people in the workforce).
• Survey attitudes about a career-related topic and reflect critically on the data and methods used for the survey.
• Estimate and calculate probabilities in determining life expectancy risks for insurance companies.

Science

• Interview a worker about the impact of particular scientific developments on their work practices (for example, the impact of genetic testing on police work).
• Interview a worker about how science informs their daily work (for example, a vet, doctor, council environment officer, or waste water treatment worker).
• Interview scientists about their work.
• Visit a workplace to observe the manufacture of selected materials and take note of the different types of work involved.
• Research occupations that require the use of particular chemicals or materials (for example, interview horticulturists about how an understanding of ecology and chemicals affects their methods of pest and disease control).
• Investigate the impact of particular scientific developments on employment and business opportunities (for example, the creation of new industries as a result of the space programme).

Technology

• Investigate the influence and importance of technology in particular businesses, industries, or institutions.
• Research the technological knowledge, skills, and qualifications needed by those involved in particular industries.
• Identify the changes that have occurred in an industry or job as the result of new technologies.
• Use information and communications technologies such as KiwiCareers.
• When producing technological solutions, explore important considerations in the world of work (for example, meeting quality standards, managing time, and using human and physical resources safely and effectively).
• Work co-operatively with community groups and business enterprises.

Learning outcomes

Schools may wish to identify outcomes for students that will help them to achieve career education and guidance: developing self-awareness, becoming aware of opportunities, decisions and planning, and taking action. The outcomes will provide teachers and clear focus on what the students are working towards.

There are many opportunities within each essential learning area for teachers to help to achieve career education outcomes. Depending on the learning area, these will arise when:

• achievement objectives in a curriculum statement link directly to career education
• teachers plan opportunities for their students to meet both career education outcomes curriculum achievement objectives within the context of learning programmes.

Assessment of career education outcomes is also embedded within assessment in relation curriculum achievement objectives. Assessment procedures may include informal formal observations, peer and self-assessment, and using portfolios and exemplars.

Areas for Learning Outcomes in Career Education[1]

Evaluation methods

Each school needs to formally evaluate its career education and guidance regularly against the purposes and objectives established in the school charter. This review helps identify strengths that can be built upon and areas that need addressing.

Evaluation can be carried out through questionnaires, surveys, observations, interviews, discussions, and reviewing written records, such as summaries of student files.

Possible questions that could be used to direct the evaluation include:

• What is the evidence that career education and guidance is integrated across the curriculum? Are there opportunities for improving it?
• Is career education and guidance integrated and co-ordinated between different levels?
• Is career education and guidance learner centred, and does it meet the students' needs?
• Is the school catering for the diversity of its students?
• Is career information accessible to all, impartial, accurate, and up to date?
• Are all the students making use of the career education and guidance facilities?
• Do the students have confidence in one-to-one career guidance?
• What benefits do the students gain from particular activities?
• Is the school making the best use of time and other resources allocated to career education and guidance?
• Are there ways of improving the use of those resources?

Schools can also evaluate the effectiveness of their career education programme by looking at the transitions students make from school to tertiary education and the workforce.

[1] Please refer to the appendix for suggested learning outcomes for each of these areas.