The Career Choices curriculum: Academic Innovations

Career Choices leads students through a step-by-step process (up to 100 active-learning exercises) that enables them to articulate who they are and what they want their lives to look like after high school. Designed with scope and sequence, each of the activities builds on the ones before so that when documented in the Workbook and Portfolio, students can easily compile their 10-year plan and store it online at the optional www.my10yearPlan.com to review, modify or update later.

Central to the message of the award-winning Career Choices curriculum is helping students become career focused and career committed while learning how to make effective decisions about their futures. Students who enter college or post-secondary training career-focused and career-committed are far more likely to graduate and transition into productive work that matches their education and training.

Becoming career focused and career committed doesn’t mean that students are choosing the career of their adult life. Instead, they are learning an important decision-making process by pondering and answering the questions: who am I, what do I want, and how do I get it. This is an explicit process they will use throughout their lives with all major decisions they face. Knowing this process in a step-by-step sequence will expose young people to sophisticated techniques and strategies not normally experienced at such a young age.

Once students complete this process and have articulated their dreams and personal career and lifestyle goals in this quantitative way in their 10-year plans, school retention rates will soar (both high school and college). When the acquisition of education becomes relevant to their future life satisfaction and when students understand the consequences of not getting a good education, they will exert the effort required for the rigorous coursework required to thrive in the 21st century.  

The Career Choices curriculum also includes interdisciplinary components for optional integration into English Lanuage Art and Math along with online enhancements. 
            Possibilities: An Supplemental Anthology of 50 essays, poems, stories and plays
            Lifestyle Math: Your Financial Planning Portfolio
            www.careerChoices.com
            www.LifestyleMath.com
            www.My10yearPlan.com

For the Career Choices standards correlations for the Course Standards for Freshman Transition Classes, click here
For an overview video podcast click here