Building Blocks For Change: What it Means to be Career Ready

Posted by on November 05, 2012

What it actually means

The Career Readiness Partner Council, a coalition of national education, business, philanthropic, and policy groups, has released a four-page statement on what it means to be career-ready. According to the group, a career-ready person effectively navigates pathways that connect education and employment to achieve a fulfilling, financially secure, and successful career. To be career-ready in the global economy requires adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning, mastery of key academic and technical knowledge, and skills and dispositions that vary from one career to another and change over time as a person progresses along a developmental continuum. Career-readiness incorporates engaging workplace experiences that allow a person to apply academic and technical learning to real-world projects alongside professionals, which can start with career awareness and exploration that includes job shadowing, internships, apprenticeships, and service-learning. Career-readiness requires a comprehensive system of supports that deliver learning when, where, and how it is needed, by a cadre of experts that includes teachers and career professionals. To accomplish this for every student, policymakers must align policy and funding infrastructures that break down long- standing silos between secondary, postsecondary, and workforce systems and provide the full spectrum of supports to ensure seamless transitions from high school to college and beyond. High school teachers, leaders, and counselors must engage with business and industry and higher-education leaders and faculty to better understand what is expected of high school students. And parents and students must expand the goal of “college-bound” to include career goals.

See the brief: http://www.careerreadynow.org/