Tools for Transition:
Resources and Technologies to Help Guide Youth from School to Careers
A Forum — March 25, 1994
Background
Paul Barton, Director of the Educational Testing Service Policy Information Center, set the context: young people are not getting the guidance and information they need to make a successful transition from school to careers. The extra effort to meet this guidance challenge "will not come wholly through increased staffing. The money is not likely to be there. We will have to put new tools and new technologies to work on it."
Barton noted that career guidance has received inadequate attention in school-to-work transition initiatives. Significant energies have been devoted to "applied" learning strategies that integrate vocational and academic instruction; to enhanced articulation between high schools and community colleges via Tech Prep; and to increasing use of work-based learning. Not so guidance.
Juliette Lester, Director of the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (NOICC), posed the same problem this way in a recent commentary for Education Week: "In almost every discussion of problems and solutions in the school-to-work transition, a critical piece is missing... The best school-to-work transition programs in the world will be ineffective at best and useless at worst unless students have a good idea before they enter them what they want to do, what career path they want to follow."
The public Employment Service is generally not in the business of helping students still in high school, though it was once and perhaps should be again, Barton said. Schools never developed job placement services of their own, and schools' broader guidance mission has gone largely unattended. The average ratio of students to full-time guidance counselors is 338: 1, and much of the guidance effort is aimed at university-bound rather than work-bound students. "Failure here is like sending people out on a survival course without a map," Barton allowed. Yet given pervasive budget crises and the school reform movement's inattention to guidance, the situation is likely getting worse, not better.
In this environment, the best hope of reversing the guidance breakdown and inserting career exploration as an integral component of school-to-career programs lies in technology -- in automated, individualized, computer-delivered curricula that enable young people to begin deciding upon a chosen career path and then provide them the information they need to achieve their career goals.
Educational Testing Service
Though ETS is best known for delivering standardized tests like the SAT and GRE, ETS Vice President Alice Irby explained that ETS has a longstanding commitment to guidance -- to helping "young people get jobs by understanding the connection between themselves, their career aspirations, and the demands of the workplace."
ETS developed its first interactive career guidance program, the System of Interactive Guidance and Information (SIGI), in the early 1970s. A decade later ETS brought out an enhanced version, SIGI Plus, that is now on line in more than 1,000 colleges and many libraries, high schools, and job training centers, providing students a chance to assess their interests and their skills, and to begin zeroing in on career opportunities that suit them. ETS has continued to expand SIGI Plus over the years, and it recently added a new component providing information on Tech Prep programs. Through this new software, interested students can find answers to such questions as: What is Tech Prep? How could Tech Prep benefit me? What careers does Tech Prep lead to? In Tech Prep, what courses should I take in high school? What happens after high school? Can youth apprenticeship be part of Tech Prep? Where can I find more information on Tech Prep?
ETS recently added two computer-based programs to help students make the school-to-career connection. WORKLINK is a student record system that motivates students to work hard and perform well in high school by providing them a printout displaying not just their grades but also teachers' ratings of their work habits. WORKLINK provides a mechanism to make school performance count in the workplace, and it also includes a guidance component to help students clarify their career goals and plan a program of study.
The second new ETS program is AEQUITAS, a computer-based assessment and certification system in such office skills as word processing, spreadsheets, typing, data entry, and basic workplace math and reading. Initially developed by ETS for employers, AEQUITAS is now available to students -- offering them how-to tips and diagnostic feedback rating their efficiency on 24 office skill disciplines. Once a student masters an office skill, he or she is issued a certificate of mastery which can be shown to employers.
ETS will soon introduce a yet another career guidance program -- this one a multi-media system complete with sound, graphics, animation, and full-motion video. Built around the familiar metaphor of a shopping mall, students using this PLANSMART program will visit the "test yourself arcade" and the "talk it over cafe" -- all part of a coordinated, comprehensive, and unusually engaging career guidance and assessment system.
National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Lester described NOICC's multi-pronged efforts to improve career guidance services for youth and ensure that labor market information is utilized effectively in the career exploration process. NOICC's activities fall under three categories: career information, staff training, and program development.
Career Information. Forty-eight states now operate computer-based career guidance systems offering up-to-date information about occupations and about educational opportunities. More than half these systems were developed with funding from NOICC, and many are operated through NOICC's state affiliates (or SOICC's). (The NOICC/SOICC network also provides career information through tabloids, videos, and other publications.) Two states participated in the day's Forum:
The Pennsylvania Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (POICC) has developed a "Pennsylvania Careers" program that allows users to identity job and career options that suit their individual interests, abilities, and educational goals. Another program, "CHOICES," aims specifically to help high school students relate their skills, abilities, and goals to specific career options. Two related programs, CHOICES JR and CHOICES CT, offer assistance to junior high/middle school children and to adults in career transition, respectively. Another program, the Pennsylvania State Training Inventory, provides a rapid response directory of education and training programs available statewide and in sub-state regions.
Like POICC, The Wisconsin Career Information System (WCIS) was also on hand at the Forum to demonstrate its wide variety of automated career information programs. The latest WCIS offering, "Career Visions," is a comprehensive guidance program featuring animation, color graphics, sound, and video that is adaptable for use by middle school students, high school students and adults. According to WCIS Director Roger Lambert, "Career Visions" is now available in all of Wisconsin's public community colleges, universities, and libraries -- and in 70 percent of its public school systems. In addition, WCIS offers a range of other computer-based guidance programs targeted to specific age groups and/or specific guidance needs (resume writing, college selection/financial aid, etc.)
Program Development. NOICC's program development efforts are targeted both to educators and policymakers and to youth themselves. Through its "National Career Development Guidelines" NOICC has been attempting to clarity the essential elements of effective career guidance by spelling out specific competencies -- in self-knowledge, educational and occupational exploration, and career planning -- that should be instilled in elementary, middle school, secondary and post-secondary students. Through its "Career Development Curricula," NOICC has written a training program to enable counselors at all levels to teach those competencies.
To serve youth directly NOICC has developed and disseminated the "Get a Life" career development program, in which students use a portfolio approach to develop career plans and document their work readiness. "Get a Life" was pilot tested with more than 5,000 students in five states during 1992-93. Eight more states joined the demonstration in 1993-94, and the program is being used by sites in nearly all states.
Staff Training. Staff training is the third element of NOICC's career guidance agenda. Through its "Career Guidance Training Program" and its "Improved Career Development Program" NOICC provides in-service (and sometimes pre-service) training for counselors at all levels to deliver career guidance programs and to incorporate labor market information into these efforts.
American College Testing
ACT Washington Office Director Jerry Miller presented "Work Keys, "a new program to relate the job skills of individuals to the skill requirements of specific jobs. In Miller's words, Work Keys represents "a new metric" for education, a long overdue update to the traditional Carnegie system that measures credit hours and diplomas but fails to provide a direct connection between what students are studying and what they need to know to succeed on the job.
Echoing the American Society for Training and Development's "Workplace Basics" research and the findings of the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), Work Keys bridges the gap between school and work with a three-part approach: job profiling; assessment and reporting; and targeted instruction.
The Work Keys process begins with an analysis of the specific skill requirements of each job. Prepared by ACT job analysts with assistance from workers and their supervisors, this "job profile" outlines the proficiency levels required on a spectrum of job-related basic skills -- i.e., applied math, reading for information, teamwork, applied technology.
The second phase of the Work Keys process is a skills assessment of students and workers wishing to qualify for the job -- measured on the same skill categories used to prepare the job profile. And the final phase of Work Keys is to overlay the job profile with the individual's skill assessment. The result is a portrait of job readiness: If the individual fails to meet any of the skill standards, Work Keys identifies the specific skill shortcomings so that learners and teachers can target instruction directly to the job. To help teachers develop target instruction effectively, ACT is publishing a 50-100 page document for each skill category describing the specific competencies required at each skill level.
"The degree structure, course structure [in education], the way it is now, it just doesn't work," Miller said. "Work Keys provides students real and focused learning goals."
Though not part of Miller's presentation, ACT also demonstrated a computer-based career and education planning program entitled "Discover." This program operates on two tracks: an information only track, which quickly provides specific information on occupational and educational opportunities; and a "guidance plus" track that leads users through a more deliberate career planning process starting with career awareness and leading through assessment (of interests, skills, and experiences), occupational information, and decision-making to generate a detailed career path action plan.
The three presentations were followed by hands-on demonstrations of the technology and small group discussions with the presenters.
This brief summarizes an American Youth Policy Forum that took place on March 25, 1994 on Capitol Hill, reported by Dick Mendel.
The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) is a non-profit, nonpartisan professional development organization that bridges youth policy, practice and research for professionals working on youth policy issues at the national, state and local levels.
AYPF’s events and policy reports are made possible by the support of a consortium of philanthropic foundations: Ford Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, GE Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WT Grant Foundation, George Gund Foundation, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, KnowledgeWorks Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, Charles S. Mott Foundation, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, and others.