Develop Your Skills and Promote Yourself Through Unpaid Opportunities Lesson Plan

Concept:

Skills and connections can be developed through many types of experiences to support career planning

Student learning associated with this concept can support achievement of provincial learning outcomes:

NB 1, 2, 3, 6
NL 4, 5, 7, 9, 14
NS 2, 4, 7, 10
PEI 2, 3, 5

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Rationale:

As students prepare to enter post-secondary education or training programs and the labour market, drawing on the skills and accessing connections they have built will help them feel more confident in making career decisions. Students may not always recognize that they are developing skills through their extracurricular activities, their volunteerism or other community engagement opportunities. In completing and reflecting on their self-assessments, they may have been able to use examples from these unpaid opportunities to validate their skills results. In addition to skill development, unpaid opportunities can also help them develop a network of individuals who can serve as mentors and advisors, directing them to resources that can support their career planning. In this lesson, students will be able to examine how the skills they develop through unpaid opportunities and the connections they make can support their transition into the labour market.

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Teachers can access resources to support delivery of this lesson in the Resources/Teaching Strategy Folder.

This lesson presents an opportunity for teachers to collaborate in supporting student learning about the role of self-assessments in career planning. In addition to Career Education courses, teachers can consider how students are able to meet cross curricular learning outcomes in other courses such as English/French Language Arts, Multimedia, Social Studies etc. This cross curricular approach also supports a unified approach in addressing the “why” of what they are learning. Students can develop an awareness of how and why what they are learning connects to them, their community and their future.