Linking careers to the curriculum

“Every young person needs high-quality career guidance to make informed decisions about their future. Good career guidance is a necessity for social mobility: those young people without significant social capital or home support to draw upon have the most to gain from high-quality career guidance”. (Gatsby Education)

Careers education is increasingly becoming a core part of curricula. In England, the Gatsby benchmarks are a set of 8 guidelines developed for schools to follow to ensure good careers education for students. The principles we feel are most relevant to this course, and that we’ll explore in this section of the course, are:

• Linking curriculum learning to careers
• Providing experiences of workplaces
• Providing encounters with employers and employees

How do we avoid careers discussions being tagged onto the end of a module? One way of ensuring that careers get discussed throughout a stream of work is to map different job roles against different stages of a module. For example, if your module focuses on infectious diseases, can you introduce different careers linked to the topic throughout the module. We’ve provided an example video you could show whilst teaching students about malaria. YourGenome malaria careers video

Later in this week we’ll be looking at how external speakers and providers can be utilised – could you get a speaker in (physically or virtually) to talk about their career and how it links to what they’ve been doing in class?

How and where do you introduce career examples in your teaching?