What are some effective strategies for advocating for career education in schools?

You should also consider and simple needs assessment in your population. For example, special education students, once the gap is identified its easier to get buy in from the administration. Of course data is always supportive and useful.

Assessing the current state of career education at an institution requires data, content expert collaboration, intentional leadership, follow-through from assessment, and finally, adaptation from results.

Even if you have a well established strategy you should review it at least termly. Things move fast in education and by aligning with the schools strategy it can help identify and give you allies to advocate for resources.

"Career education is not just about preparing for a job, it's about equipping individuals with the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to navigate a rapidly changing world of work." - Dr. Tony Bates. Engaging parents, educators, and community leaders to promote awareness of the value of career education in schools is one effective advocacy technique. Building support through collaborations with nearby companies, influential figures in the sector, and reputable organizations can also be successful. In order to spark curiosity and encourage professional aspirations, organizations can also host workshops that give students practical experience in a variety of careers and connect them with mentors and internship opportunities.

If your school has an active parent association, this can be a great volunteer base for doing research, planning events, and showing up in general. Often, PTAs are more active at the elementary school level, and participation starts to fall off as the children get older. So, if you want to play a long game, engage the PTA volunteers at the elementary level with career nights, or better yet a career week. Keep these same parents engaged by continuing to talk about career training as their children age into middle school and high school. If you can link these volunteers from different schools in the district, they could be big allies by doing the work as volunteers and keeping costs low for the schools.

Start with the local chamber of commerce. What local businesses support school or community sports teams? Where do the kids and families go after a game? What local businesses give these teams financial support? You’ll often see team trophies and plaques thanking the business. This is a clue that the business owner supports youth in your community. They might also be open to participating in career education, either as speakers, or they could donate in-kind or financial contributions.

We would always make an appointment with the high school ag teacher and stop in and share info with their classes. We would teach a segment, share an activity, or just visit with their classes about career and tech programs at our college. We tried to get our professors into those classes often.

It’s easier to model a successful program than to start from scratch. What other schools or community organizations already offer career education? Who can you talk to for case studies and success stories? This is an important part of both the research phase and the proposal stage. See if you can collect statistical evidence from a successful program as well as testimonials that show how the other program’s success could be replicated in your organization.

The most powerful advocates are the teachers. Use them to promote careers. Careers education is everyone's responsibility. We have great collaborations with our departments and in the main they welcome our support and input.

Create a robust evaluation strategy that allows you to measure the impact of your careers provision: (1) As interventions happen: for example, capturing change in increased knowledge about apprenticeships after an employer talk or increased confidence in pursuing post-18 pathways after a career guidance interview. (2) Over time: for example, assessing career readiness using a tool such as the Careers & Enterprise Company's Future Skills Questionnaire when a student joins your school or college (for a baseline measure), at key points across their education and your careers provision, and immediately prior to completing their studies at your school or college. (3) As alumni: this includes time series analysis of destinations data.

Most people appreciate recognition for a job well done. Thanking the people who made the career training possible, whether it’s a teacher, administrator, school counselor or parent volunteer can help them feel like their work mattered. Some people prefer to be thanked for what they did, and what the objectively positive results were achieved by their contributions. Others prefer to be valued for who they are. Contact the person who is in charge of the school’s social media, and create a post to recognize the people who helped on the school’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagrams accounts. If your city, town, or suburb has a website that publishes news, you can send a media release so they can get recognition in your local news.

One way that I advocate for career education in schools is through delivering my signature iCan career skills workshops. I tailor these masterclasses and training events to the universities, colleges, or schools, based on their student body's needs. I have found the feedback from students to be very positive, with them citing that having an external perspective helped them rebuild their confidence quickly, challenged their mindset, and gave them clearer direction for their careers. Sometimes having an engaging external speaker come in and deliver career skills training, or give a motivational talk, is enough to inspire the students with enough confidence and ambition to recreate that change in their own lives.