One of the most important reasons behind a formal education – besides teaching your students how to think for themselves – is to get kids ready to take on an engaging and exciting career.
And a career? Well, that’s the foundation to any person being able financially provide for themselves – what we call, financial independence.
That’s why I take a real interest in helping kids, tweens, and teens get the best fun career exploration activities resources out there.
So that one day, they can find a fulfilling job and be able to earn enough money to not only survive, but thrive.
What all is involved in career exploration for students?
To be honest, there’s a lot to cover here.
You want to provide fun and engaging activities for topics like:
Whew – that list wasn’t meant to overwhelm you.
Rather, I wanted to inspire you with what an important and life-changing topic you’re covering with your students and kids.
Plus, to outline some of the areas you can cover with these fun career activities and resources I’ve found for you, below.
First up, let’s talk about how to get your kids and students actually interested in career exploration activities.
There’s no better way to pique a student’s interest than to find out what THEY are most interested in learning about.
One way to do this is to start off your unit of study with free career assessments.
I spoke with the people at Truity.com, and they said a good age minimum to take their free career assessment is 14/15 years of age.
The test is free to take, plus you get a basic report with results. You don’t even need to have a student register for them to do this!
However, if you want to be able to view each of your student’s results, you’d have to sign up for a Pro account.
This free, 30-question career quiz from the U.S. Department of Labor will help a student figure out some possible career choices.
Another career assessment test sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor is O*NET’s interest profiler. There are 60 questions in total.
Here's a reading passage that's centered around some great career and job terms. The theme of the story is Pixie finding a new job.
Assessment questions and a teacher's guide are included.
While I don’t recommend you center your entire career unit around career exploration worksheets, the ones below can definitely add to students discovering jobs, industries, etc.
Suggested Grades: 6-8
Scholastic has some fantastic worksheets and lesson plans to help with career exploration for students.
In the “Find Your Right Now Job” worksheet, students will research jobs and apprenticeships around their area of interests to find two jobs that they could apply to (when they're a bit older).
Here’s a simple, one-page worksheet you can get for free with a free account on Teachers Pay Teachers.
It will help focus your student’s career research.
This free worksheet of fun career activities has an idea that I love – for students to create a family career tree. They’ll need to ask family members and do the research, which of course is a great way for kids to understand their loved ones even better (plus to learn a thing or two).
With a free Teachers Pay Teachers account, get this simple classroom job application your students can fill out to “apply” for classroom jobs.
BizWorld has this free, simple worksheet to help your students research a career and salary information.
Looking for more than just career preparedness worksheets?
Check out these enter career lesson plans, available for free.
Hint: many of them include both worksheets and videos.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) has a program called RISE Up, a certifying program with curriculum that helps students and young adults get hired in the retail industry.
Check out the RISE Up classroom activities section to find lots of short videos from people actually in the retail industry, answering questions students might have and teaching students about their industry. It also includes a worksheet for each video.
Check out Level 3 (for Grades 9 – 12), Module Chart Your Course. It talks about:
Download an entire lesson plan for high schoolers that include topics like:
This is a full-year course, with the following units:
The state of Louisiana has come up with these free resources to help students explore careers in LA's highest-demand industries. These are project-based learning activities.
Honestly, there's a ton here.
They've broken it down into the following units:
These career games for kids and teens create an engaging way to teach career awareness.
Students are asked to brainstorm lots of different careers (it's suggested that they can ask parents, grandparents, and others to come up with ideas ahead of time).
Each student writes these ideas onto a piece of paper, and everyone takes turns acting out a career while others try to guess what they're doing.
Great for better awareness about career options!
Students select different career paths, are given a typical salary, and then are given various spending choices. The amount of money they spend throughout the game is tracked so that they can see, and make any adjustments as needed.
Suggested Age Range: 14 years and older
Practical Money Skills has come up with another free online career game, and this time it's all about two teenagers trying to start up a business in a competitive atmosphere.
Students will have to evaluate business deals, learn how to grow their business, and how to overcome financial challenges in business and in life.
Suggested Age Range: Grades 3-5
Being paid by commission is wayyyyy different than getting a salary (or, even, being paid hourly). You have to actually sell something to make any money!
This game has your students calculate their commission rates while, at the same time, learning about how auctioneers work in a variety of different places.
Here's a set of worksheets to go along with this game.
Like it or not, the “gig economy” where people are not full employees of companies, but still accept gigs from them and earn a small or substantial amount of money on the side, seems to be here to stay.
So, kids should understand how this can fit into their career and money plans!
The Uber Game gives your teen a scenario, such as they have a $1,000 mortgage payment due in a week, and then asks them to try and earn enough money through accepting gigs in order to pay that bill.
Can they do it? Is it hard or easy? Can they sustain themselves on a gig job?
Psst: You’ll want to check out my 31 free personal finance homeschool curriculum, as some of the resources also have free career resources.
When students research a career, they need to look at it from several different angles before deciding if it’s possibly on their “Career Hitlist”.
Here are the different things to research for a career:
Psst: Have you ever heard of CareerVillage? Students can ask career-related questions and get them answered by professionals, for free! Students of all ages are accepted, and they’ll need to create an account (for free) to ask a question.
You want your students to feel what it’s like to be on the job in a career path they’re researching.
Help them to do this by:
While it used to be difficult to figure out income averages for a career or job type, it’s quite simple nowadays thanks to some seriously great, free, resources provided by the Department of Labor.
Here’s a one-stop salary finder, where you enter the occupation and your location to get an idea of the average pay.
It also offers a listing of professions, so students can click around by career cluster (or category) and just explore.
Psst: another important thing to make students aware of through research? Are career projections. In other words, is an industry or job path they want to pursue growing, or are the jobs getting scarcer? Here’s a great resource from Workforce Solutions (for just the Houston-Galveston area, though it still drives the point home about the importance of this question) that shares percentages for various careers.
EverFI has free financial literacy lessons for kids and students, and Lesson 3 is on income and taxes.
Students will be given different ideas about careers, as well as the pros and cons to each.
Looking for a career project your middle school students will enjoy?
Kentucky's Department of Education has a really cool resource – a group of middle school career projects, broken down by 16 different career clusters (and 80 different career pathways within those clusters).
Not only that, but they have student work samples for each one!
There are projects and exploratory tasks for careers in:
Amanda L. Grossman is a writer and Certified Financial Education Instructor (CFEI®), a 2017 Plutus Foundation Grant Recipient, and founder of Money Prodigy. Her money work has been featured on Experian, GoBankingRates, PT Money, CA.gov, Rockstar Finance, the Houston Chronicle, and Colonial Life. Amanda is the founder and CEO of Frugal Confessions, LLC. Read more here or on LinkedIn.
