You know how - a bit too often - when discussing senior subject selections with students, they say, 'I haven't really thought about it'.
Or they come to you hoping you'll tell them what to do next. Or they take the path of least resistance. Or are totally unrealistic in their expectations.
These scenarios are a long way from ideal and all too common.
BECOME Your Own Careers Advisor (TM) is new, and has been specially created for students approaching subject selection to help them look broader, think deeper, challenge assumptions or expectations (perhaps from parents or others) about their career trajectory.
Above all, it is designed to get them to begin to take charge for themselves.
BECOME Your Own Careers Advisor (or BYOCA as we call it!) is a highly self-reflective version of the BECOME program. It is purpose built for this age and maturity, when things are beginning to get real.
BECOME Your Own Careers Advisor (BYOCA) combines inspiration with a structured approach that powers students to come to subject selection with a flexible plan that is considered and researched, yet has enough openness to allow for what they don't know yet.
Over the ten sessions of the program, students explore a wide and inspiring range of career ideas, look deeply at personal motivations and influences on their ideas about success, and conduct scaffolded research to find out about pathways into a broad occupation area.
If you are familiar with BECOME at the younger year levels, this structure will be familiar, moving students from Awareness - to Aspiration - and into Agency. It can form a part of a multi-year or whole school careers education strategy with BECOME.
Students bring their BYOCA Journal or portfolio to subject selection discussions, can share it with parents, and use it to discuss their options and reasoning with their careers advisor.
When students have completed the BECOME Your Own Career Advisor program, they have:
Be Your Own Careers Advisor is about working out what your next best steps might be.
It requires students to articulate where certain steps or subject selections will take them (so that they don't mis-match their plans to their aspirations), and deliberately reassures students that there is more than one path into a particular career. It requires them to look for clues in themself and engage with genuine, in-depth info-gathering about careers.
They've invested in articulating and documenting their journey to date, in a way that places them in the driving seat, designing a future that excites them.
BYOCA doesn't remove you, the professional careers advisor, from the picture! It transforms your role so that subject selections are all about robust discussion based on a prepared portfolio of thinking.
You're talking to students about subject selections from a position where each young adult has already examined their motivations and looked at their aspirations, explored some options and researched a vision of the future that excites them right now plus the various potential pathways to getting there.
Because having agency means taking charge over which direction you are facing and what next steps you plan to take.
What if you never had to hear 'I haven't really thought of it' again?
If you are ready to see how BECOME Your Own Careers Advisor can transform subject selections for your students, register your interest with us, drop us an email or book a time for a chat.
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Bev Laing: Mar 7, 2024 12:29:01 PM
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