Job exploration is a crucial part of preparing students for their future careers, helping them discover different industries and develop key skills. In our webinar, Engaging Career Path Experiences Your Students Will Love, we discussed effective ways to make job exploration more interactive and meaningful. In this blog, we’ll recap key takeaways from the webinar and share tools to enhance job exploration in the classroom.
Childcare and Early Childhood Education
Childcare careers give insight into children’s emotional, mental, and physical development. The field of child development is expanding, offering opportunities in education, clinical care, research, and training. With 80 percent of childcare centers reporting staff shortages, demand for professionals in this field continues to grow.
To engage students in childcare job exploration, we recommend the Child Care Experience™ Program. This is an in-class experience that simulates what it would be like to work in a childcare facility. Just like in a real childcare center, students must care for multiple infants of varying ages at the same time.
During the simulation, learners must determine what care each infant needs. Infants will require feeding, burping, rocking, changing, soothing, and being saved from choking. Students will log all the Care Events in the Baby Care Journal. Additionally, users must respond to random infant health and parent communication scenarios.
The program comes with easy-to-use software that tracks child abuse; successful, attempted, and missed care; notes logged in the Baby Care Journal; responses to random scenarios; and which student addressed each Care Event during a simulation. It also allows you to customize simulations to the difficulty level and experience desired for each individual or group in a simulation.
Older Adult Care
With the number of individuals aged 80 years or older expected to triple between 2020 and 2050, careers in older adult care will become increasingly important. This growing demand is creating opportunities for a variety of careers, including nursing, home healthcare, occupational therapy, and social work. As the aging population continues to grow, so does the need for skilled caregivers who can provide compassionate and specialized care.
Research has shown that using simulations in geriatric training improves students’ empathy toward older adults. Young students often can’t connect with the challenges many older adults face simply by reading about them or listening to lectures. Simulation gives them the opportunity to really feel what it’s like to struggle with limited mobility and sensory impairments.
For older adult care job exploration, we recommend using the Geriatric Simulator to give students first-hand experience with a variety of age-related challenges. Through the simulator’s weights, restraints, and impairment glasses, learners can experience decreased sense of balance, change in body image, confusion, loss of strength, fatigue, and more.
The Geriatric Simulator comes with an eight-lesson curriculum with lessons on topics like exploring geriatrics and gerontology, visual impairment, and declining mobility due to aging. It features 10 to 15 hours of teaching content as well as slide presentations, student activities, and assessments.
Healthcare
Healthcare careers offer diverse opportunities to make a meaningful impact on people’s lives while working in a fast-growing industry. With the growing aging population mentioned previously and advances in medical technology, the demand for skilled healthcare workers continues to rise.
One of the most important technical skills used across healthcare is sterile skills. For every 100 hospitalized patients, seven in high-income countries and 10 in low- and middle-income countries acquire at least one healthcare-associated infection. Perfecting sterile skills is crucial for preventing infections and increasing patient safety in a variety of healthcare careers.
The Sterile Techniques Simulator is an excellent job exploration tool that teaches sterility in a repeatable and engaging way that sticks. Students can practice tracheostomy suctioning, male and female catheterization, and central line dressing changes on the simulator. It uses conductivity to monitor how students interact with it, letting them know if they broke sterility during their procedure.
This simulator includes a four-lesson curriculum that covers sterile technique basics and how to perform each procedure you can practice on the simulator. It features four hours of teaching content and aligns to National Health Science Standards. Additionally, it comes with slide presentations, student activities, and assessment tools.
STEM and Electrical
The future is electric. Global electricity demand is expected to rise at a faster rate, growing by an average of 3.4 percent annually through 2026. This growth will lead to an increased demand for electricians, electrical engineers, and other STEM professionals specializing in electrical systems.
To engage students in STEM and electrical job exploration, we recommend the Trailer Circuits STEM Kit. This kit safely teaches learners the basics of electricity, skills to build circuits, and how to apply their understanding to properly wire and troubleshoot trailer circuits.
This kit sets you up for success with three hands-on simulators, eight LMS-ready slide presentations, a teacher guide, and a digital student workbook. Each lesson is ready to put into your LMS and be delivered as you see fit. This supports students working in independent teams.
The slides for each lesson in the kit are made so you, as the instructor, aren’t the one delivering the content. By freeing up the teacher to be a roving troubleshooter and learning accelerator, we put the responsibility of engagement on the student’s shoulders, developing those important 21st century skills of independence, ownership, and time management.
Explore More Resources
Looking for more job exploration resources to engage students?
- Watch the full webinar on demand
- Check out our free guide on activities for exploring careers in any class
- Discover our free career exploration lessons
