Career Readiness: Preparing for the Workforce

Embarking on a successful career requires more than just academic knowledge—it demands a set of skills that go beyond the textbooks. To prepare students for these demands, educators play a pivotal role in instilling key skills early on. This article explores practical strategies to help students develop these crucial skills and ensure that they are ready to hit the ground running in their chosen career fields.

In a recent report from the World Economic Forum, the top ten skills expected to increase most rapidly in importance between 2023 and 2027 include creative thinking, analytical thinking, technological literacy, curiosity and lifelong learning, resilience, flexibility and agility, systems thinking, AI and big data, motivation and self-awareness, talent management, and service orientation and customer service. So, how can educators start instilling these skills in their students early on? Here are four classroom strategies to promote career readiness:

1. Expose students to various career options

Each of the 16 Career Clusters® from Advance CTE is a representation of Career Pathways that are related by skill. This framework functions as a useful guide in developing programs of study that bridge secondary and postsecondary curriculum. It also offers a blueprint for creating individual student plans of study for a range of career options. Understanding how specific skills translate to real-world professions helps students discover their interests and passions and empowers them to choose the educational pathways that will be most successful and fulfilling.

2. Emphasize the importance of soft skills

Creating and nurturing relationships are critical to success in any career. Soft skills, which center around personal and social capabilities, enable individuals to communicate and manage their relationships at the workplace. The challenge for educators is that these skills are naturally more ambiguous, and therefore harder to teach, than content- and subject-based skills. Providing students with real-world examples of soft skills and showing how to develop them are major factors of career success.

3. Encourage interactions with professionals.

A key aspect of career readiness involves exposing students to job possibilities and the accompanying skills they require. Speaking directly with working professionals, hearing about their experiences, and seeing different workplace environments can help students understand what it really feels like to be in that career. Additionally, chances to form close relationships with mentors and peers can arise through career exploration opportunities like job shadowing, internships, and volunteer experiences, helping students build a foundation for their professional network early on.

4. Have students earn industry-based credits.

Encourage students to earn an industry-recognized certification or other credential in their field of interest while they’re still in high school. If students are confident in a specific area of interest, taking that interest to the next step and pursuing a certification or credential can help them determine if it’s truly the right pathway for them. Plus, it may help them gain early work experience and jump-start their careers.

Interested in learning more about how Edmentum’s online programs can provide students with opportunities to develop career-specific skills across a variety of in-demand fields? Discover our curricula catalog of over 100 Career and Technical Education courses. You can also download Edmentum's Career-Connected Learning workbook to explore delivery models, funding sources, and evaluation criteria to build an effective career-connected learning program.