Empowering Student Success through Career-connected Learning
- Hans Meeder
- Jan 14
- 2 min read
Career-connected Learning comprises related strategies and experiences that help individuals learn about careers, discover their own aptitudes and interests, develop those aptitudes into skills, and begin trying out and matching these aptitudes and interests against real career options. One of the key outcomes of CCL is to help individuals develop Career Navigation Skills.
A CCL system involves three components:
Discovery: Self-discovery and learning about career opportunities
Exploration: Going deeper through education and career planning, trying out career opportunities through CTE programs and career-related coursework, experiencing work-based learning, and exploring postsecondary education and training
Navigation: Learning how to seek and gain employment, and, when ready, entering the job market
Each individual experiences their own journey through a Career-connected Learning system. While the components of a CCL system will look somewhat familiar to educators, they often currently happen as “random acts of improvement” or a “happy accident” instead of a thoughtfully designed system to provide consistent, high-quality experiences for all students.
In many schools and colleges, the components of CCL often happen in silos and sometimes are targeted at different groups of students. For example, postsecondary preparation and planning might be carried out by staff in the counseling office with a focus on helping first-generation college students apply for college and obtain financial aid. Schools with a more traditional approach to Career and Technical Education might focus CTE recruitment to students who are perceived to be “non-college bound” and therefore are planning to enter the workforce immediately after high school.
In some schools, work-based learning experiences are ancillary to CTE programs, but in other places, work-based learning is targeted at academically high-performing students who are seeking experiences to strengthen their competitiveness for college admissions. All of these individual efforts are positive, but when they are not connected through a CCL systems approach, educators may duplicate efforts and miss opportunities for synergy among their efforts.