Intermediate Career Planning
What does Career Planning look like at the intermediate level?
Throughout our student's elementary education, the focus of academic and career planning revolved around building awareness of the world of work, as well as the skills and abilities needed to be successful in school and work. Students continue building awareness through intermediate school and begin to explore career clusters in a more personalized way. Increased self awareness with ones interests, strengths, soft skills, and personality traits helps students make connections to which career cluster could be a good fit for them. Below are the ways in which students engage in continued career awareness and exploration.
Questions about your child's Career Planning experiences? Contact your homeroom teacher or school counselor.
Below you will find the Career Planning experiences for students in 5th & 6th grade.
Click on each experience to learn more about what students will learn, who will be teaching it and how parents can support their learning at home.
5th Grade
- Students will be introduced to Xello as a tool to track their career exploration and they will get setup with an account.
- The counselor will teach students about many features in Xello and how to access different components as they learn about Xello and reflect on their current interests.
- Parents are encouraged to engage in conversations with their child about their academic and career plans as their child begins exploring options.
- Students will complete the Xello interest inventory to identify interests related to career clusters.
- School counselors will, during a classroom guidance career unit, teach students what the Xello Career Matchmaker interest inventory is and how to use it to guide their career exploration.
- Parents can ask their child, "What did you learn about yourself in the interest inventory you did in Xello?"
- Students will build on their awareness of the existing career clusters as defined by Xello.
- The school counselor will teach a career unit to students in March/April covering the different career clusters, explore what they already know and connect them to new information and ways to learn more.
- Parents can ask your child...
- What they are learning about career clusters?
- What are some of the different clusters?
- What clusters sound most interesting?
- Students will build on their understanding of the importance of developing their soft skills, by determining a soft skill that they would like to improve on and writing a goal during their winter guidance class with their school counselor.
- The school counselor will teach an academic unit about soft skills and goal setting.
- Parents can ask your child...
- Why are soft skills important for success?
- What soft skill have you decided to work on?
6th Grade
- Students will be able to successfully navigate Xello as a tool to track their career exploration.
- Students will complete the Xello interest inventory to identify interests related to career clusters.
- The school counselor will meet with every sixth grade student in small group meetings multiple times during the year to review work done in Xello and in career and academic units throughout the 5th and 6th grade years. These meetings are called iChats.
- During the Fall iChat and the career guidance unit, school counselors will review and reflect on the student's Career Matchmaker results from both 5th and 6th grade. Students will learn how the results of these inventories can help them to explore career clusters with more purpose.
- Parents can ask their child...
- What kinds of careers sound interesting to you?
- What cluster are those careers in?
- Did you get the same results for your career cluster recommendations in 6th grade as you did in 5th?
- What have you learned about what you are interested in and how it is connected to career clusters?
- Students will be able to identify how many career clusters there are and name the two career clusters their interest inventory suggests they might like.
- Students will be able to present important facts about one of their career clusters of interest.
- Computer Applications teacher will teach students the components of conducting effective research through the use of the Focus, Strategize, Evaluate (FSE) process in their Computer Applications class. Assist students with their career cluster presentations.
- During their Spring iChat, the school counselor will provide discussion prompts to review career cluster information and help students to reflect on what they like or dislike about different . We will discuss what more they might want to learn about to help them understand the career clusters better.
- Parents can ask your child:
- How many career clusters are there? (There's 16)
- What are your two career clusters of interest based on Career Matchmaker?
- What kinds of careers do you think you might like within your top two career clusters?
- What are some interesting facts you learned about the career clusters you like?
- Students will set a goal to improve on a soft skill or academic skill that needs improvement.
- During the Academic classroom guidance unit with the school counselor, students will reassess themselves on the report card soft skills and on their academic performance. Adjustments to 2nd quarter goals will be made as needed.
- Parents can check Infinite Campus to see what scores your child is receiving for their soft skills as well as their academic skills. Acknowledge the importance of developing both skill sets. Support goal setting and celebrate goal completion with your child.
- Students will begin recording extracurricular involvement and hobbies in Xello.
- During classroom guidance and the iChat’s with the school counselor throughout the year, students will have opportunities to update their accounts with what they are involved in.
- Parents can help by noticing when your child does or tries something new, encourage them to update their Xello account like you would a resume.