Want “Career-Ready” Students? Start in Middle School

Written by Thomas Torre Gibney , WestEd Senior Research Associate

February is Career and Technical Education (CTE) Month, a time when we see a greater focus on the “career” side of college and career readiness conversations. Naturally, these conversations tend to revolve around what high schools can do to prepare students for meaningful careers and the postsecondary pathways that lead to them. But waiting until high school to nurture students’ career interests is too late. The reality is that it’s never too early for students to start learning about themselves and their futures. And there’s ample reason to start the process in middle school.?

Why Middle School?

Career development is about more than just preparing students for a specific career; it’s about helping kids develop an expansive, growth-oriented mindset about what they can achieve. That means reaching kids early and often in their school-age years, before their aspirations and sense of self have narrowed. By high school, many students’ beliefs have already crystallized about how far they’ll get in school, what spaces they belong in, and what jobs are right for them. Those entrenched beliefs can make it harder to affect student mindsets and plans.?

In contrast, middle school students are curious and open-minded. Middle school sits between childhood and adolescence, a time when students are growing physically, psychologically, and developmentally in new and dramatic ways. Well-designed career development activities in the middle grades focus on students’ strengths, interests, and agency in the world, leveraging middle schoolers’ desire to exercise the autonomy they crave in these critical formative years. In doing so, they encourage students to imagine what’s possible for themselves. Many students, particularly those from historically disadvantaged communities, may not see people who look like them in certain professions, or they may have internalized cultural messages about who can succeed in desirable careers. Reaching students at younger ages helps combat harmful stereotypes about who belongs in certain kinds of work and helps kids see themselves in a range of different careers.?

Taking Action to Expand CTE Education

This is one reason why state and local leaders in places like Nebraska are taking steps to reshape what career development looks like earlier in school. As part of our recent analysis, The Landscape of Middle School Career and Technical Education in Nebraska, we heard from districts using 6-week rotational models that allow students to explore careers as early as 6th grade. We also heard examples of middle and high school staff working together to align CTE offerings to provide students with opportunities for acceleration and avoid duplication of content across grade levels. This helps students plan coursework more intentionally so they can take advantage of opportunities to earn industry-recognized credentials and transferable postsecondary credit in high school.?

Another reason to engage students in career development opportunities earlier in school is that it helps bring core academic concepts to life. Access to these opportunities in middle school is especially important because the middle grades are when students can start to lose interest in school. Research shows that student engagement peaks around the transition to middle school. After that, students tend to disengage in academics, particularly in subjects they view as irrelevant.

Middle schoolers need developmentally appropriate opportunities to make explicit connections between their schoolwork and their broader lives—which is what makes career development a potentially powerful student engagement strategy.??

Imagine a project that asks students to interview members of their community, identify the skills those people use in their jobs, and make connections with their own interests and strengths. A project like this might allow a student to hear directly from a respected adult about how plumbers use math to determine the length of piping needed to connect their kitchen sink to the pipe outside. Or how water treatment operators use discipline-specific literacy skills to read, interpret, and communicate water quality test results. These kinds of career-connected learning activities help students understand how reading, writing, and math are relevant to tangible and important issues that impact their own community, like ensuring all homes have safe drinking water.?

Integrating CTE and Career Development Skills into Curricula

CTE is a natural place for career development in the middle grades. For one thing, career development is baked into CTE course standards, and teachers often come from industry or have experience in the field they teach. But as career-connected learning models that blend CTE and general education coursework grow in popularity, we shouldn’t assume that kids simply acquire career development skills just by taking a few CTE classes in high school. Like other skills, career development skills need to be explicitly taught and scaffolded across subject areas and grade levels. And like any other skill, they deepen over prolonged, cumulative practice. Middle school is the opportune time to lay that foundation.?

Now, with the release of Advance CTE’s modernized National Career Clusters Framework last fall, there is fresh momentum around implementing a model of career development that cuts across subject areas and grade levels. This is not a radical idea, either: Last month, EdWeek reported on the results of a poll showing that three quarters of voters believe it is “extremely” or “very” important that schools provide students with career-connected learning. But we shouldn’t just delegate career development to CTE teachers and counselors, as has historically been the case. CTE is a great vehicle for teaching career development, but it shouldn’t be siloed there.?

To be effective, career development needs to be woven throughout the curriculum. This doesn’t mean rejecting the “college” part of college and career readiness, nor does it mean locking students into rigid pathways. It means shifting mindsets to view career-connected learning as a continuum of experiences that begins early in middle school and threads through CTE and general education classes alike—including planning for the many postsecondary pathways that lead to economic mobility.??

This February, it’s time we start a national conversation about redesigning the student experience to maximize the natural synergies among CTE, core academics, and career development. Just don’t wait until high school to start.?

Thomas Torre Gibney is a Senior Research Associate at WestEd and a former CTE program manager at the Tennessee Department of Education.?