What is Career Readiness and Why is it Important?

It is hard to imagine that career readiness has everything to do with children collaborating with their mates to solve complex problems.

Are you wondering about the best foundation to help the students gain obvious essential core skills that would extensively help them succeed in their careers? Are you looking for the right to ensure entrance into the job market?

No matter how hard you try to shove it off your memory, the truth remains that all these and more are the reality for today’s students as they mature into adulthood and become part of a working community.

Since employers increasingly report that it is difficult to find career-ready applicants, it is best to prepare students for careers they are qualified for.

Most educators have not thought of preparing their students in a somewhat different scenario other than the usual classroom activities.

They do not actually see it as part of their role to get these future leaders ready to assume the position of leadership in their different careers.

Unfortunately, a study conducted in 2019 reported that 73% of employers perceived it was, to some extent, challenging to find qualified candidates for the job, while 34% admitted that schools have not carefully got their students ready for the job ahead. 

Therefore, educators owe it to their students, no matter their level of study, to get them ready for their life ahead of college. As such, you may wonder what career readiness is.

Here, we will break down the meaning for you, including the importance and rightful skills that can augment this readiness. Read on.

What is Career Readiness?

Your ability to find a job in the right industry and at any level, understand your job role, and effectively report and relate to everyone within the professional setting, while growing in your career, is career readiness.

It also means preparing students at any age with essential skills to find, acquire, maintain, and grow within a job.

To make this workout, most schools have developed programs that would prepare these students ahead and allow them to make informed decisions about their future. 

Getting the students ready for their careers might include using some effective tools to help them reflect on their passions and strengths.

In essence, career readiness means building technical or innovative readiness that aimed to sharpen their skills in present work environments.

This means that while technical skills are very necessary in the workplace, you need soft skills to support these technical skills.

These soft skills help them multitask and take up roles outside their core job positions. Such career readiness skills as financial literacy, career development, professionalism, problem-solving critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, negotiation, emotional intelligence, time management, and many more are not to be toyed with if you must get it right at the workplace. 

You do not need to get to the working-class level before developing these skills. They can also be called transferable skills because they can apply to several tasks and not just peculiar to a particular job role like your technical skills.

Therefore, whether the task is complex or mundane, these skills will help you jump the hurdle and excel.

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Why is Career Readiness Important?

Today, the job market is fiercely competitive and evolving. What was applicable the previous year may no longer be appealing in the current year.

Just about anything that could help them enter the job market and display the right skills vital to their job role is all about career readiness.

It includes career exploration, professionalism, career development, personal financial literacy, digital citizenship, among others and you must have them while helping you launch a successful career. And this comes with all the accomplishment, pride, stability, and progression.

As an employee, your number one goal is to impress your employer with your services. And you can only negotiate from the hiring stage and started strongly once you are employed.

If you cannot defend the skills you mentioned at the hiring stage, you may not last long at the job. 

Let’s see some reasons career readiness is a great way to start a good career path:

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Reasons for taking Career Readiness

Career readiness involves both in-class instructions and apprenticeships, internships, externships and co-ops, which support students to put their newly gained skills to practice and pick up real-world skills that they may not learn from the classroom.

Equally, career readiness education is necessary for schools because it prepares students for life after school and offers them the skills to navigate the workplace. 

Career readiness can differentiate an excellent employee from a great one. Although they are not often made priorities in schools, they give students a competitive edge over their mates when they seek the same job.

Career readiness can apply to any job at any company or level. A student’s first job at the grocery store during the summer holiday could help him or her prepare for the task ahead.

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What Should a Career Readiness Curriculum Cover?

A career readiness curriculum should envelop several subjects and skills aimed at solving real-world problems and they include career exploration, problem-solving, career readiness assessment, and other soft skills.

In addition to that, career readiness should accommodate STEM, laying special emphasis on math, science, and career concepts.

STEM skills are necessary for the modern industry and so, when students acquire them, they are getting prepared for the tasks ahead.

So, incorporating real-world and STEM skills will be essential for their readiness ahead. That way, students will not get stuck on their journey to the top and can avoid getting confused about the skill.

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What Skills are necessary to make Students Career-Ready?

There are several skills every student must possess to make them career-ready in the ever-developing and dynamic career world.

Although they are many, we broke them down into these three skills. See the career readiness skills you can adopt in 2023:

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1. Academic Skills:

Students need to be imparted with basic academic knowledge, particularly in English, math, and arts.

Aside from that, they need to apply these skills in the day-to-day activities that they encounter in their workplace.

For instance, the general language used in every work setting is the English language, which means to interact with others, you should be able to speak good English.

On the other hand, you can use math in performing simple calculations and arithmetic in the workplace.

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2. Employability Skills:

Also known as soft or transferable skills, you can use these employability skills every day to carry out one task or another or to solve certain basic skills that do not need technicality.

One cannot survive without employability skills, whether at the workplace or in our everyday interaction with others at home school work, place of worship, and many more.

As earlier pointed out, these skills include critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, and teamwork.

Creativity, persuasion, time management, and other skills. Children must be provided learning grounds to practice these skills and learn to apply them in real-world scenarios. 

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3. Technical Skills:

These are the job-specific skills that are necessary to carry out the job role you applied for. For instance, if you want to pursue a career in engineering, you will need to take your STEM subjects very seriously.

These will help you to narrow down your choices to specific subjects and then start to follow the paths wherever they may find themselves.

If you do not start early enough, you may still be at a spot while your mates have passed several hurdles ahead. 

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Ways to Integrate Career Readiness Activities into Your Curriculum 

If you are an educator, you can incorporate career readiness programs into the classrooms.

Students nowadays can easily identify and adapt special skills that would help them to become leaders in their various industries and job positions tomorrow.

To achieve that, here is what to do:

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1. Getting them connected with local employers:

Students can be offered opportunities to learn from professionals within the community where the school is founded.

Such activities could include regular lunch and learn workshops, workplace tours, virtual question and answer sessions.

It could also be a career fair where they invite professionals of all careers to share their experience in the workplace and help the students to understand what it is like to work in an organizational setting.

In the long run, students should prepare to face certain challenges to get them to climb the professional ladders easily and excel.

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2. Creating work-based learning opportunities:

If there is no formal program in place, they can assign students to get mentors in the professional setting and learn from them.

After that, they can write a summary of what they learned in a report book. 

3. Promoting highly demanding thinking skills:

They can give students abstract assignments that only require them to think through before arriving at the right answers.

These questions are usually tough and critical, which may not have the right or definite answers.

Doing such will open their eyes to an abundance of opportunities in life that only their minds can comprehend.

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4. Assigning group work to them to encourage teamwork and collaboration:

Today’s job world thrives on collaboration. Certain things a particular organization cannot achieve alone, it can leverage the strength of another to get there.

For students, offering them grounds to collaborate only opens doors of opportunities to cooperate with others. Doing group work helps them to easily achieve that.

While at it, offer marks based on group achievements while giving a bonus to the individual students who went the extra mile to make the project a reality.

This does not just encourage collaboration, it offers fertile grounds for communication, problem-solving, self-advocacy, understanding others’ weaknesses and standing in the gap for them, and you achieve many more benefits through this method. 

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5. Providing early exposure to careers:

Children, even from the kindergarten stage, can start getting exposed to certain life scenarios.

They should be offered the grounds for observations and seeing things from professional points.

They must not get through with education before they can understand what the job market requires of them.

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Bottom Line

Helping students become career-ready is not something that one can achieve in one swoop. It extends beyond usual classroom requirements.

They need to be equipped with the right skills they need to compete with their mates and also succeed in any job they find themselves. With these opportunities, they will be confident to make great starts in their careers.

Most importantly, these children are the future of the world. Their success determines the continued existence of the world.

If not given proper attention, they may not make it to the peak of their careers. Helping them to get there should be every educator’s top priority. 

References

  • everfi.com – What Is Career Readiness and Why Is It Important
  • xello.world – What is Career Readiness and How You Can Weave it into Your Curriculum

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