Career education is thought of here as a philosophical concept for the reorganization of the curriculum. The primary concept focuses on careers as the primary thrust of the school experiences from kindergarten through the adult years.
A program of this kind for the traditional 16 years of school (6-3-3-4) encompassed all or part of the scope of work identified as career development: career planning and career information.
In addition, since it provides for curricular reorganization, it includes training and experience-centered activities leading to the development of skills in all students for direct entry into employment or additional training in a post-high school setting.
Lack of career education
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The importance of career education cannot be overemphasized. Lack of career education often results in the following:
- Ignorance of self about a career in which one can realize himself or herself
- Lack of job satisfaction and consequent frequent job changes
- Life-long boredom, poverty, and drudgery
- Joblessness in the face of the availability of employment opportunities
- Poor vertical job mobility opportunities
- Inability to be productive
- Overall and cumulative economic malaise in the country as a whole and the attendant social problems.
Importance of career education
The importance of career education can therefore be seen in the following benefits that average pupils or students can derive from it.
Ability to perceive
Ability to perceive what occupation or career is, and the values that one can derive from it.
Ability to understand
This is the ability to understand oneself in the world of work.
Career education offers opportunities to make a pupil or a learner understand and perceive himself or herself through test and non-testing techniques which aim at making the individual pupil/student realize his/her peculiar features or characteristics, like mental capabilities, interests attitudes, aptitudes, and values.
He or she then is allowed to expect blocks of a career environment in which he/she can function effectively without losing his/her peculiarities.
Ability to develop
This is the ability to develop a concept of career behavior through reliable, adequate, and appropriate career information sources.
Career education provides the individual pupil/student information about the word of work the job market, techniques of writing application letters for jobs and attending interviews, approaches in wages negotiation, and how to scan the classified ads’ pages.
Ability to select
Ability to select a career and finally get placed into it: there is a difference between selecting a career and getting placed.
Experience in teachers’ colleges of education shows that not all students trained to become teachers get a place as teachers. Others enter into related professions.
Ability to make
Ability to make adequate preparation possible to enter into a particular career through mastery of related courses or subjects over the specified period: this period can also reflect other contextual experiences such as an internship, ITF apprenticeship, or actual employment environments.
Career Education and the School
The school plays a central role in career education in the following ways:
- It offers an adequate and relevant curriculum that allows students to study a wide range of subjects, which enables them, to realize areas of their strengths and limitations.
- The school offers programs that help develop a desire for work. For example, career excursions are organized to industries and another career-oriented milieu where pupils and students can see workers at work.
- Specific information on careers is provided on bulletin boards during career week/day or exhibition and through career libraries and resource persons.
- Some occupational skills are provided in schools such as typing, shorthand, dressmaking, cookery, metal and woodwork, sport, poultry, piggery, horticulture, etc.
- Self-appraisal service is provided by the counselor
- The counselor used self-appraisal records to guide the school in placing students into arts, science, technical and commercial.
- This counselor helps the student to plan his/her future career with the aid of the student’s appraisal record, which the school has helped to collect and collate into a cumulative record. The counselor’s career plan, which the school will work towards to make it materialize.
- The counselor offers all guidance services with an emphasis on career counseling which helps in alleviating the problems that may arise in the process of career development.
The school is expected to help the student realize his/her goal by making it possible for him/her to develop the right career perspective and ultimately become a fulfilled adult who can contribute to the overall survival of the country.
Career education and the home
Home-like all social agencies play a very crucial role in career development. Vocational psychologists have come up with findings supporting the calm above. The following are the contributions of the home to career development.
- The home determines the career environment into which an individual can fall. Roe (1968) postulates that the parent-child relationship determines whether a child will enter into a person-oriented or non-person-oriented person career.
- An individual career choice can be influenced by parents who serve as professional models.
- parents motivate their children to do career counseling assignments.
- Parents are expected to cooperate with the counselor during career week/day. They can act as career resources people.
- Counselor relies on data on students during career planning periods parts of the data supplied to the counselors are given by the parents.
- Parents can contribute money to support career programs. They can also help build career albums and libraries.
- The home can help develop career behavior by taking their children on holiday travels and excursions. They can also be encouraged to explore career opportunities during holidays.
Career education about the labor market
To aid youth in today’s complex world, the trained guidance worker must know the world of work.
This does not mean that he must acquaint himself with each of the over 23,000 occupations that have been identified in this country or with millions of workers who compose our labor force.
But it does mean that he must be familiar with major industrial and occupational groupings with the sources of occupational information, and with the most effective methods of using these sources to find answers to the most effective methods of using these sources to find answers to questions, he and the counselees have about the world of work.
In addition to this general knowledge of today’s world of work, the counselor must be aware of many factors that act to transform the industrial picture from one decade to another and sometimes from year to year.
He must know where to find information that may affect the future of his occupation, and he must know how to interpret the available information.
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