Career Advising Across the Career Connections Framework
The Career Advising Toolkit is organized using the Career Connections Framework. The Career Connections Framework is a planning tool for districts to provide students with opportunities to develop a vision and realistic plan for their futures. This framework aligns the many efforts around college and career readiness to support students in becoming productive and engaged citizens. This framework is organized around three sectors (Career Awareness, Career Exploration, and Career Planning).
While the career connections framework is naturally linear in time frame, each phase is a building block for the next, providing students with a personalized career track preparing them for the transition beyond being a student. Through the career connections framework, we strive to prepare students to discover unexpected career paths and opportunities.
Career Advising
The world is rapidly changing, and the days have past where we see education and career readiness as two separate paths. It is of critical importance that we instead align these two paths to create a prepared and well-rounded student.
Career advising is an intentional process of looking at each student’s goal or desired pathway post high school. Educators can begin the K-12 career advising experience and start instilling ideas to what careers are and why they are important.
Career Connection Framework
The Career Awareness phase starts in kindergarten and goes through grade 5. Students become more familiar with careers through learning that connects classroom instruction to future work. Career awareness strategies show students various types of careers and stimulate interest in future work.
The Career Exploration phase sees students exploring their career interests through embedded activities, and happens in the middle school grades, 6-8. Career exploration strategies are opportunities for students to discover work environments and understand the various aspects of the workplace. Students start plans for their future with career information and postsecondary education data.
While students are continuing to explore career paths, the focus of this stage is career planning. Activities provide advanced experiences that offer hands-on opportunities in a workplace. Career Planning strategies focus on making clear links between career options and educational decisions.
The process ultimately culminates in high school where student-led decision making aligns student interests, learning styles, work values and aptitudes with their goals and aspirations. It is critical that educators have a full comprehension of the structure of the workforce so that they can be positive successful mentors through a students desired pathway. In the end, the career advising process is not about graduating high school, but rather graduating to successful post high school choices.
Districts, schools, and educators are encouraged to utilize the Career Connections Framework in relation to their role and position within the development and implementation of career advising to help determine access points within the Career Advising Toolkit. The parts of the Toolkit are defined on the following page.
Last Modified: 10/11/2022 9:44:18 AM