CTE and Career Education
K–12 students often do not receive information from their schools on programs like CTE that offer practical pathways to careers and opportunity. A Morning Consult poll reports that less than half of Gen Z high schoolers say they had enough information to decide the best career or education pathway for them after high school. And two-thirds of high schoolers and graduates say they would have benefited from more career exploration in middle or high school. This gap between what students want and need and what schools provide in career preparation has consequences. Students often struggle in the transition from school to work and receive lower wages when they enter the workforce. It’s high time schools strategically invested in career education.
An effective CTE pathways agenda requires a thorough career education program with a goal of instilling career aspirations in students and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, and relationships they need to reach their potential by the end of high school. The international 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has documented program models that integrate a young person’s school life with increasing levels of knowledge and employment options organized by three categories: exposure, exploration, and experience.
- Exposure activities introduce students to jobs and careers. These begin in preschool and include reading books or telling stories about jobs and careers and visits from those who work in different jobs. Exposure also entails age-appropriate, outside-the-school experiences like workplace visits as young people move through school.
- Exploration activities allow students to explore work by engaging them in volunteer work, job shadowing, resume development, and practice job interviews. These activities typically begin in middle school and continue through high school.
- Experience activities include work-based learning where young people engage in sustained and supervised projects and mentorships like internships and apprenticeships. These opportunities are an options multiplier, creating bridges to other opportunities that lead to full-time jobs, more education, or both.
There are other useful frameworks. Colorado’s work-based learning continuum uses an approach for middle and high schools organized by workplace activities: learning about work, learning through work, and learning at work. These approaches help young people develop new knowledge and skills, social and professional networks, and the capacity to navigate pathways that turn ambitions into reality. They can be combined with platforms like YouScience that use artificial intelligence to create assessments that help young people discover personal strengths and aptitudes and match them to potential careers.
Such career education programs have many benefits. OECD examined the link between young people’s participation in career-preparation activities and adult career outcomes in eight countries. They report that there is “evidence that secondary school students who explore, experience and think about their futures in work frequently encounter lower levels of unemployment, receive higher wages and are happier in their careers as adults.” These programs also nurture the technical and material aspects of success and its relational dimensions: social networks for young people, mentoring relationships, and professional networks that help them throughout life.
Consider the United States Youth Development Study, which followed those born in the mid-1970s to age 30. It finds a positive relationship between those who worked part-time at ages 14 and 15 in internships and apprenticeships and those likely to agree at age 30 that they hold a job they want. It seems almost undeniable that greater exposure to the workplace better equips students to prepare for the type of career that suits them.
Career education also deepens young people’s knowledge of the culture of work and fosters their capacity to aspire to, create, and navigate the work pathways that make a reality of their ambitions. It also helps them develop an occupational identity and vocational self, which gives them a better sense of their values and abilities. On a practical level, CTE creates faster and cheaper pathways to jobs and careers. Finally, career education fosters local civic engagement from employers and other community partners by cultivating the connections and bonds essential to innovation, economic dynamism, and a flourishing local civil society.
