Project overview
Our group is hoping to propose a long-term support system to help high school students in urban public schools make informed career decisions. Specifically, we hope to increase teen awareness, exposure, reflection, and planning of career goals and decisions. We believe that by addressing the issue of insufficient support for students with career planning, our system could have longer term effects on high school dropout rates, job security and satisfaction, and the skills gap.[1]
Inspiration + community work
We were each inspired by personal experiences either with ourselves or close friends or family members struggling to make decisions in high school about what career path to follow. We are encouraged by the variety of programs that exist (such as internships, job shadowing, mentorship programs, career counselors, and career focused curriculum); however, we expect that most, if not all of these programs are being cut from low income, urban schools with diminishing budgets.
Two programs in Pittsburgh really stood out as positive examples of how young adults could get support with career planning, The Neighborhood Academy and the Bloomfield and Garfield Corporation’s youth education program. The Neighborhood Academy is an independent, college preparatory school in Pittsburgh. It provides college preparation for students for grades 8 to 12. Specifically, the school targets students with financial needs in order to “ break the cycle of generational poverty.”[2] The Bloomfield and Carfield Corporation offers an out-of-school youth employment program that works with adults between the ages of 17 and 21 to gain work experience in a variety of career opportunities, such as financial, medical, and technological fields. [3]
While both of these programs support students by helping them to build career and college readiness, and have also had a positive impact on the community, we believe that their models lack scalability. While we are unsure what form our project will take (policy, curriculum, toolkit, website, etc.), we hope to craft a solution that is easily distributed and available to a broad range of students without having to rely on a large operating budget.
Work to date
Our group has met several times to discuss and build a research plan that includes interviews, card sorting, and a cultural probe. We are planning to talk to high school juniors, parents, and high school guidance counselors to gain perspective on the issue from each of our key stakeholders. Additionally, we hope to speak to subject matter experts in the community (such as Jeremy from Propel) who may have interesting insight about challenges and opportunities.
The primary research questions are:
-
What are existing support systems to help high school students make career decisions? How effective / ineffective are they?
-
What are the needs of each stakeholder (counselors, students, parents)?
By understanding the current support systems and the needs of each stakeholder we will be able to move forward with a clear direction and specific problem to solve through our final project.
View our research protocol here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9_nFVFifxJoMbPlVoM7GB957c3CJ9o1KXdB_4bqqVY/edit?usp=sharing
Secondary Research
Along with planning our primary research we have continued our secondary research of current programs and tools. We found a variety of tools that are currently being used by schools and the military to assess career aptitude.
-
ASVAB: “The ASVAB is a timed multi-aptitude test, which is given at over 14,000 schools and Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS) nationwide and is developed and maintained by the Department of Defense.”[4]
-
Career Test: find your destined career based on a series of personality questions.[5]
Proposed Direction
While we do not have a specific product or service in mind for our final proposal we have a number of principles we hope to fulfill. We also plan to narrow and specify our project direction, and extend our list of principles once we have completed our stakeholder research.
Principles:
-
Accessible to a broad range of students, especially those in underserved, urban neighborhoods
-
Limited cost to produce, maintain, and distribute
-
Long-term support system, hopefully something students could be introduced to in late middle school and use throughout high school and possibly college
-
Could be a tool for students, counselors, or parents, or a combination of stakeholders, depending on the needs we find
Team: Salwa Al-Mannai, Robyn Hammond, Molly Johnson, Alex Krysiak, Ana Vazquez-Trejo
[1] See our proposal for more details — https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Th1F2DQy4tcurW8GvQPOUqIdzTguZE9siZybCrx1zzM/edit?usp=sharing
[2] www.theneighborhoodacademy.org
[3] http://bloomfield-garfield.org/youth/education/
Design and Policy 