Helping Children Understand Careers and Employment

Helping Children Understand Careers and Employment

Every child should leave school with skills that will serve them for their working adult life. This means providing children with rich education that teaches values and behaviours that promote success in education and later employment. There is a wide world out there full of opportunities – school must act as the stepping stone to which, inspiring young people to reach their full potential.

Why is it Important to Help Children Understand Careers and Employment?

While it is normal for an adult to pivot career direction at any point during their life, providing careers guidance should be a crucial part to a school’s offering as to set a strong foundation for a student’s future careers. Below, we will explore a number of key benefits of high-quality careers advice. 

Preparing Students for Later Life

Unsurprisingly, the main key benefit of careers education is the skills students gain that will benefit them when they enter the world of work. This includes reflecting on their interests to align them with careers that may match, but also gives learners the opportunity to learn more about the responsibilities that come with employment (which can, of course, come as a surprise to many young people in their first jobs).

Improving Maturity 

Schools often feel like their very own ecosystem, and for many students they will have a lack of focus on their life after school has ended. Having open conversations about employment and careers can encourage students to think long-term and set goals, and in turn, helps foster maturity and forward planning. This allows students to consider how their current choices and actions will affect their future careers, rather than solely focussing on the present. 

Inspiring Young Learners

As a child, we have outlandish ideas about what we might like to do when we grow up. This is influenced by parents’ careers, the media and stories, amongst other things. While these influences can spark a curiosity, PSHE can help expose them to the wide variety of careers that are available to them, encouraging them to dream big and set ambitious goals for themselves.

How to Address Careers and Employment in School

Without a doubt, addressing careers and employment for school-age learners is vitally important, but knowing where to begin is often a big struggle (especially if it’s a topic you’ve never personally taught before). Luckily, PSHE lessons offer the ideal opportunity to tackle choosing a career and employment, allowing your class to learn these integral skills as part of their personal development.

Creating a PSHE Syllabus for Choosing a Career

If you want to incorporate choosing a career into your PSHE lessons, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a PSHE syllabus. Unlike statutory subjects (with a fixed and sometimes rigid curriculum to follow) PSHE is much more flexible, with no set curriculum to follow. This is advantageous as it gives teachers the flexibility to tailor the curriculum to the class’s needs, but can be very time-consuming in an already busy teacher’s schedule. This is where pre-made curriculums can come in handy such as Muse Wellbeing. These pre-made curriculums often come with tried and tested learning activities, resources and equipment, letting you hit the ground running with PSHE education. 

Outline the Different Types of Careers

As part of your PSHE “choosing a career” lessons, one of the most essential topics you’ll need to cover is the different types of careers. Indeed, while every career and job offer is unique – even within the same company – it’s worth noting the different types of careers on offer to help inform your students’ decisions.

There are several main categories for careers that may be worth considering here. Some common fields include:

• Medical and dental care
• Emergency services 
• Teaching and education
• Engineering and manufacturing
• Animal care / management 
• Agriculture and farming
• Construction and architecture
• Business management positions
• Accounting and bookkeeping
• Marketing and content creation
• Computer science and software IT

These are just a few different fields that you could present to learners as opportunities for their own careers. It’s highly important to ensure children are aware of these options to help inform their own decisions on where to focus their efforts.

Highlight the Different Skills Needed

It is normal for children to be reluctant to start working on their future career goals at such a young age, and the goal is not for 7 year olds to be practising open heart surgery. But we want to prepare students for their future, and starting these conversations early is not only inspiring for them but can help them develop knowledge about the different skills that are required for each job. This not only helps them focus on the skills they may need, but can be a fantastic starting point if they are confused about their future to look at where their current skill set lies. 

Cover the Challenges of Each Role

While it is not necessary to provide detailed overviews of each job role during the PSHE lesson, it can still be a great opportunity to touch on the challenges that may be faced in common job roles. For instance the workload that can come with teaching, or the emotional strain that medical professionals often carry. This is not intended to put children off their dream job, but to provide them with a holistic view of jobs so they have both sides of the coin to make a choice on what they would like to explore with their future.

Engage in Role Play and Group Activities

One of the key benefits of PSHE is the ability to get creative with lesson delivery. Don’t think you need to lecture students for 60 minutes about the ins and outs of being a doctor. Get them up on their feet and role playing different scenarios and experimenting how they might approach challenges associated within each role. There is countless research backing the benefits of learning through play, so don’t be scared to use it in your teaching practice!

Arrange Speakers from Different Industries

Alongside your PSHE lessons, it can be a truly effective learning opportunity to enrich the teaching with external talks from professionals within each industry. This will really bring the knowledge to life for a lot of children, as they act as inspiring role models and show them their dreams are possible. Orchestrating an opportunity such as this also gives children the chance to ask any questions about the job that go beyond general public knowledge that teachers can find.

Kickstarting Your Students’ Lives Through PSHE

If you think that careers and employment education could be valuable for your students, getting started with the right curriculum is essential. Indeed, students of all ages can benefit from careers and employment coaching and support, and PSHE offers the perfect opportunity to do so. Alongside lessons explored on careers and employments, teachers should also allow children time to further their understanding of money management and finances (that are of course gained from work).

With all this in mind, developing a plan from the ground up can potentially feel daunting. 

If this is something you have experienced, don’t hesitate to give pre-made curriculums or learning resources a try. You might just find they offer the perfect starting point for your own lesson planning. At Muse, we offer a ready-made PSHE curriculum, created by teachers, for teachers! It is the only tool you need to navigate the PSHE curriculum.