Introduction

Hello Career Pathways Group, 

I recently joined this group, and am excited to delve in. I have worked as an ESL instructor, college transition advisor and program designer, and professional developer. I work on literacy-based career exploration lessons for WIOA-funded programs, high schools and social service agencies. I will post some of these resources soon and am interested in hearing from others. You can see the curricula and training videos here

Best, 

Ellen Baxt

 

Comments

Hi Ellen, Welcome to the communities of practice. I'd love to hear more about your career exploration approach. How do you tackle multi level courses? Do you focus on specific career cluster? I'm looking forward to learning more. Sincerely, Kathy

Hi Kathy, 

There are 11 volumes - one cross-sector, and ten sector-based in Healthcare, Technology, Community & Social Services, Education & Childcare, Manufacturing, Food Production, Transportation & Warehousing, Retail, Construction, Hospitality, Recreation & the Arts. The structure of many lessons is applied to all sectors, adapting the sector-based information. The big idea, however, is teaching research skills, so that students and teachers can learn how to research any career that interests them. Lessons include graphs, first-person worker narratives, worker videos, use of career databases, and other tools. It is written at the HSE level, with practitioners making adaptations for lower levels. 

I also provide professional development for practitioners outside of academic settings, like counselors, employment office career navigators, etc. For that population, I discuss how to "dial down" the academics and focus primarily on the career content. With academic programs, we focus on how to integrate academic skills and career exploration. 

Feel free to contact me for more information at ellenbaxt@gmail.com

Best, 

Ellen

Hi, Ellen -

I join Kathy and Susan in welcoming you to the LINCS Community.  Thank you for sharing more about your program, and how you're working to embed career exploration into your academic programs.  If you're not already familiar with the LINCS Resource Collection, I encourage you to check out the resources we have there on career pathways, especially the  Career Pathways Toolkit.   Please let us know if you have questions, or have resources to share that work well in your program.

Again, welcome, it's great to learn more about your work.

Best,

Mike Cruse

Career Pathways Moderator

michaelcruse74@gmail.com

I like the approach that Ellen describes:  Create "template-"type activities that can be adapted and customized to various sectors, jobs, basic skills, learners, instructors.  This is efficient in the sense that instructors and learners, once they've used an activity to explore one type of job, then use it to explore a different type of job -- perhaps in a different industry. At the same time, such an approach allows instructors to be creative, bring in new videos or other resources they -- and possibly their learners -- identify.

We used a similar approach in a community college I formerly worked in in New Jersey.  We adapted concepts and activities from a customer-service curriculum developed by the National Retail Federation Foundation (in collaboration with Equipped for the Future) to teach relevant customer service skills to people interested in working in retail, eldercare, transportation/logistics/distribution, and other industries.  Instructors were able to move from one course to the other, making modest changes to activities each time to make them relevant to the particular job and learner population. Like the ones Ellen describes, the activities emphasized research and other forms of active learning by participants, so they not only learned about one particular job but developed the ability to learn on their own outside the classroom. 

Having a national repository of such curricula that can be easily accessed (like LINCS) is a great service for the field, so adult educators and other stakeholders (e.g., employers, labor unions, workforce development specialists) don't have to continually recreate the wheel.

Paul Jurmo

www.pauljurmo.info  

Thank you for joining us, Ellen, and also for posting information on the wonderful NYSED/CUNY instructional resources, a real instructional treasure chest. I hope that you will, indeed, share access to the other materials that address the needs of current WIOA-funded programs, which I suspect provide IET instructional models!. 

Adding to what Mike mentioned re the LINCS Resource Collection are other CUNY pearls that are worth investigating for additions into our chest! Hat's off! Leecy

Hi, Ellen.  I just joined this group too and was really happy to see your post.  I found the videos very interesting and helpful.  I am delving into the Construction CareerKit now.  I am helping to build an IET focused on the construction sector.  This is just the kind of thing we are looking for.  Thank you!

Hi, Elena,

A Construction sector resource I just came across and am starting to delve into is: http://www.byf.org/ - Build Your Future. It is a Construction careers database, similar to ones like Mynextmove or CareerZone, but for just the Construction sector. It has Construction career profiles and also career pathways within the sector, so users can see how workers can progress in the field. Their parent organization seems to be nccer.org - National Center for Construction Education & Research, which has even more information. In addition to the database of careers, they have integrated career and basic skills curricula. There is one called, Applied Construction Math, for example.

Ellen

Love this thread! Elena....here some other resources you might be able to use to support development of your A&C IET curriculum. 

  • NRCCTE Architecture & Construction Math Curriculum Map. This site has math curriculum maps for all 16 career clusters. You can download the maps, which include CCSS standards (which correspond to the CCRS standards for adult ed). 
  • Skills Commons....this is site where all open curriculum resources developed as part of the TAACCCT Grants from 2011-14 reside (somewhat challenging to sift through, but I've found some good things on there)
  • Career One Stop Career videos includes a number of resources related to Architecture & Construction jobs. Many of these videos are also available in Spanish. 
  • USDOL Employment & Training Administration Competency Model Clearinghouse has competency models for residential, commercial & industrial, and heavy highway civil construction. Each of the competencies can be clicked to see the specific skills needed. Each of these models has been developed by industry leading organizations.