High School Block:
Career Pathway Design 10
Career is the journey through life, learning and work. It encompasses much more than just employment. To achieve a sense of self and life satisfaction, each student requires personalized, equitable, and inclusive career pathway planning to secure their preferred future. The Career Pathway Design 10 course addresses this goal, amplifying learner agency, as informed by evidence-based research found in the New Brunswick Career Education Framework.
The “New Brunswick Portrait of a Learner” defines learner agency as the belief and capacity to take action to make life better for oneself and others. This course is structured on the three strands of “Thinking, Exploring, and Experiencing” potential career pathways from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): Career Readiness Project research. Students engage in informed career pathway planning through self-awareness, exploration of opportunities and engagement in authentic career-connected experiences. In the Learning Expectations listed below, each of the three OECD strands is organized into Big Ideas, Skill Descriptors, and Achievement Indicators. While it is necessary to build the foundational “Thinking” to lead to meaningful “Exploration”, the key to learner engagement in this course lies within the “Experiencing” strand. This strand will capture the hearts and minds of students, and is where the teacher should focus the majority of time. The experiential nature of this course has the potential to positively impact each learner’s personal career trajectory, and should not be underestimated.
Building upon the Personal Wellness 3-9 continuum and Career Connected Learning K-12, this course takes a student-centred, strengths-based approach to providing learners with autonomy to further their skills and competencies to connect and contextualize high school learning with career pathway and transition planning. Ultimately, Career Pathway Design 10 supports student well-being, offering a means to building confidence in creating a personalized plan that informs decision-making for high school and life after graduation.
For Educators:
CONTEXTS AND CONCEPTS
Thinking
- Self-awareness, (motivation, personal skills and attributes)
- Strengths, passions, interests
- Cultural and linguistic competencies
- Design Thinking
- Career development and connection to mental health
- Dimensions of wellness
- Social justice, barriers
- New Brunswick Global Competencies (Self-Awareness and Self-Management, Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship, Sustainability and Global Citizenship)
- SMART Goals
- MyBlueprint
Exploring
- Labour Market Information
- Skills for Success
- Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
- Culturally and Linguistically Affirming Connections
- Wellness/Mental Health, Resources
- Community Resources and Connections
- Transition Planning
- Personal and Professional Networks
- New Brunswick Graduation Requirements
- MyBlueprint
- Digital Portfolio
- Work-Integrated Learning
- Post-Secondary Pathways
- Apprenticeships
- On-the-job training
- Military
- Entrepreneurship
- College
- University
- Workplace Entry Pathways
- Gap year
- Essential Skills Achievement Pathway (ESAP) Program
- New Brunswick Virtual Learning Centre (NBVLC)
- Work Integrated Learning
Experiencing
- Experiential Learning Theory
- Career-Connected Learning
- Experiential Learning
- Models of reflective thinking:
- Community connections
- Site visit
- Guest speaker
- Extra-curriculars
- Virtual connections
- Volunteering
- Career/community networking events
- Part-time employment
- Course auditing
- Job shadowing
- Internship
- Post-secondary visits
- Project Based Learning
- Networking
- Mentoring