From Kindergarten to Career: A New Vision for Workforce and Career Readiness with Authentic Learning

This month, 20 teachers and school counselors are participating in a workforce and career readiness design workshop at the Delaware Area Career Center (Delaware County), learning how to teach core subjects in new ways by integrating authentic learning and community partnerships into current units. 

Our focus this time around? Partnering with local businesses and non-profits. We’re proving that teaching with a workforce/career readiness lens is not “one more thing,” it’s rethinking what we already do with authentic learning pedagogy. And it’s the teacher and their pedagogy (how we teach) that makes a learning experience creative, collaborative, and filled with opportunities for youth leadership, not any program, elective, or pathway without the right pedagogy. We’ve also learned a lot from partnering with local nonprofits, since we see how doing so builds workforce skills while simultaneously cultivates an awareness of the community and a need for a service mindset.  

• For more information about our authentic career/workforce readiness curriculum, Designing the Future, for intermediate and middle school students, please click on this link or reach out to us!  

• For more information on hosting a workforce/career readiness design incubator, please click here.

Career and Technical Education (CTE) is strengthened through partnerships among school districts, Career Tech Centers, and organizations like Partnerships. Yet we wonder if it is still treated as something that begins in high school, with exploration starting in middle school.

At Partnerships, we’re asking a different question: How early should meaningful engagement in career pathways begin? We believe it starts well before middle or high school. Preparing students for the future of work isn’t a program or a sequence of classes, it’s about engaging in a way of learning and way of teaching. Here’s a thought example: if many students leave the engineering pathway after the first course, wouldn’t early experiences with engineering skills and mindsets like creative problem-solving, prototyping, and using feedback help build confidence, mindsets, and interest long before the pathway begins?

We explore how authentic learning can build workforce and career skills across all grades and subjects. This raises important questions about teaching and learning: Could a fifth-grade math teacher contribute as much to career readiness as a high school internship coordinator?  What if the 8th grade social studies teacher facilitated engineering mindsets with a design thinking activity that framed a social studies unit? We believe all teachers have the potential to inform students’ future post-high school pathways, inspiring an awareness of talents and interests that build passions and insights about who they are and what they love doing.

Experience, not just exposure, shapes students’ futures. We envision schools building these skills from kindergarten through high school, so that formal pathways become the place where students refine what they’ve been practicing for years, only now as interns in real workplaces.

Let’s shift away from asking the high schooler, “What classes do you want to take?” or "What do you want to do after high school? " to ask, “Who are you becoming? What skills have you developed that you are proud of and that you want to use more of in your future? How do the skills you’ve gained help design your future?” These questions sit at the heart of true workforce and career readiness.  And the pathway to get there?  We believe it’s authentic learning.