michelle.hogan@ownfutures.co.uk
Involving all staff in Careers Work
For Careers Education to be successful it needs to be about more than just one person. Although it will be led and managed by the Careers Leader, the whole school needs to embrace and promote it. Here are some ideas for how all staff can become involved and how you can make CEIAG more of a whole school activity.
1) Make National Careers Week a whole school event. The next one is the 2nd to 7th March 2020 and it is the perfect opportunity to get all the staff involved in CEIAG. Have a look at my resources on National Careers week to get some ideas on how to promote it across the school and visit https://nationalcareersweek.com/ to keep up to date on the event. If the week doesn’t fit with the school calendar, then why not host your own National Careers Week.
2) Produce a staff newsletter to keep staff informed about CEIAG activities within school as well as changes and updates at National Level. This could also be sent out to parents to make sure they are aware of what is happening.
3) Promote CEIAG in tutor time. Five minute discussions of different job profiles https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles, or videos https://icould.com/watch-career-videos/by-job-type/ to engage students and involve tutors.
4) When companies offer workplace visits or talks for students, ask the teacher whose subject best fits to lead the visit or host the talk rather than doing it as a separate Careers activity
5) When undertaking your annual review of CEIAG provision and creating your action plan for next year, ask staff for feedback on what careers work they have done in their lessons and what support they feel they need moving forward
6) Share labour market information with staff. The job market may have changed a great deal since they started work and it is important that staff understand the world of work that the children will be entering. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-enterprise-summary-reports has summary reports for all areas.
7) Ask staff to share their career journeys in an assembly. Not just teachers but involve a range of staff who work in the school. If resources and time allow, this could be done as a ‘speed dating’ type of event with students moving around the staff.
8) When children are picking their options, ask subject teachers to spend time talking about jobs that their subjects may lead to. This helps to put the subjects into context so they start to understand what studying it might lead to.
9) This would also be a good time to organise role models from the world of work to come into lessons and work with the students. Seeing role models within the classroom in a normal lesson, rather than as a separate CEIAG activity can help students make the connection between subjects and the world of work.
10) Employers put a great emphasis on soft skills. These can often be best developed within normal lessons with a cross-curricular approach. Why not see if you could have a focus each half term on a particular soft skill such as teamwork, communication, timekeeping, which is addressed across the school.
