Introducing myself...

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to the group and endeavored to find the "introduce yourself" discussion thread but gave up looking!  I'm glad to see this is an active group.  

I'm an ESL teacher for adults in Northern Virginia and have just started to teach a workplace communication class.  Rather belatedly, I've decided to create an extension project for each of my learners to work on at their own pace on what I'm calling a Career Warm-Up.  I'm hoping students can be engaged in the process of taking an inventory of their English language/hard/soft skills, education, experience and values and develop some 5-10 year goals on how they'd like to develop their career pathway.   I'm interested in developing a checklist, some guidance and some language scaffolding to make more resources accessible to my learners.  If anyone else in engaged in such an activity or has developed similar resources, I'd love to hear from you!   Any direction or links would also be greatly appreciate.   I'm new to this career-oriented language teaching and want to ensure a success.

Ellen 

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Ellen Clore-Patron, ESL Teacher

Arlington Education and Employment Program (REEP)

Literacy Council of Northern Virginia

ellenpatron@gmail.com

Comments

Hi, Ellen -

Thanks for your introduction, and welcome!  The idea of Career Warm-ups is a great one.  A few ideas that come to mind are The Learn to Earn Toolkit and Preparing English Learners for Work and Career Pathways.  These are good places to start seeing what is already out there. 

The U.S. Department of Labor's O-NET platform also hosts two searchable career databases, My Next Move, and Mi Proximo Paso, for Spanish speakers.  These are great tools for learners to use to discover more about the required education, certifications, and job skills required for different careers.  They also include geographic information on the number of jobs available in specific fields and salary ranges, as well as projections for the future.  These are excellent resources for learners to start getting some additional information about careers where they have some interest.

I'd encourage you to expand your original post to the Adult English Language Learners (AELL) group too.  Many may be members of this, and the AELL group, but others may not be members of both, but still have good ideas to support your plans for working with your learners.

Please keep us posted on how the warm-ups are received by the students, and what your final approach to introducing the topic looks like to your learners.

Best,

Mike Cruse

Career Pathways Moderator

michaelcruse74@gmail.com