CareerConnect@Home: Building Career Exploration for the Digital Age
Image: CareerConnect@Home
Meeting the need: Replacing worksite tours with digital exploration
Spring is usually a busy time in the career connected learning world. It’s the time when students are signing up for summer programs and internships, enrolling in apprenticeships, and applying for college financial aid. It’s also the time for students to visit local employers on worksite tours. As they walk through each office, workspace, manufacturing floor, and busy shipyard, they’ve got one thing on their mind – what do I want my future to be?
Seeing real people – especially people who look like them and share some of their life experiences – doing real work expands the universe of possibilities for students. It builds a bridge between where they are and where they want to be.
In Spring 2020, over 1,000 students were scheduled to tour Seattle-area companies and organizations as part of an annual program organized by The Roadmap Project/CCER and Kinetic West. Everything was business as usual, until it wasn’t: Seattle became a center of the COVID-19 pandemic and every tour from March onward – 40 of the 50 we had scheduled in 2020 – was cancelled as employers scrambled to shift their operations.
Kinetic West reached out to our partners including Career Connect Washington Regional Network leaders, nonprofits, business leaders, and school districts to discuss our shared problem of transforming our career exploration experiences in the face of the pandemic. We were all asking the same questions: Could we deliver interesting, meaningful programming to students if we couldn’t bring them to employer sites? Would employers who were scrambling to adapt their own workforce to the changing conditions want to participate? Would students participate in the programming we created given the huge disruption to their daily routines? Regardless of the answer to these questions, collectively, we had the same conviction: career exploration is a critical part of every student’s education, and we owed it to Washington students to try.
The nuts and bolts of building CareerConnect@Home
Knowing our partners shared the same urgency to help Washington students learn about real jobs and industries in our state, we set a goal for our program: curate high quality, online, employer-led discussions, that were open to all students, occurring every school day in May. Furthermore, we wanted these discussions to showcase the variety of industries and employers across our state – giving students in Yakima a chance to learn about careers in maritime and exposing students in Bellingham to creative design opportunities in Spokane.
The real challenge was timing – if we wanted to pull this off, we had to recruit and coach employers, create an online platform, and spread awareness to students statewide in the three weeks remaining before our first live discussion: May 4. To meet our deadline, we divided our team into four workstreams:
Employer recruitment: Recruit at least 20 employer speakers (1 per school day for four weeks) from a range of industries, including skilled trades, big and small business, and from rural and urban areas from across the state.
Content creation and coaching: Create high-quality session content that will be interesting and relevant to teenagers, make the sessions consistent in format and easy for employers to produce.
Technology platform: Meet students where they are, using platforms that they already use, that are easy to access on mobile phones, and accessible to students in different languages/formats. Make it possible for students to ask live questions while protecting their privacy.
Marketing and awareness: Get the word out to students using trusted messengers like peers, teachers, parents, libraries, and youth-serving community organizations.
Our team started meeting daily to plan what started as four weeks of programming. We chose 3:30 PM as the session time, so these talks would happen after their online classes, but before students had to disperse to evening jobs or other responsibilities. We identified themes for each week and drew up a list of focus employers to recruit. We brought on board a team of volunteers to help with the ever-growing list of tasks – from setting up our technology platform to coaching our recruited employers on creating engaging sessions.
Recruiting employer partners
Kinetic West has a longstanding area of practice focused on career connected learning and the relationships we established through that work were essential in recruiting employers for CareerConnect@Home. Career Connect Washington Regional Networks helped us plug in to local companies with whom they frequently work. Skilled trades training programs stepped forward to represent apprenticeship pathway opportunities. Challenge Seattle and the Washington Roundtable connected us to their members. We also weren’t afraid to make some cold calls, if it meant getting a cool and interesting speaker like Chef Eduardo Jordan, the James Beard award-winning restaurateur.
Once we had the employers signed up, we set up individual coaching sessions to ensure they could provide engaging digital overviews of their industries within just 30-40 minutes. Most of our participants were experienced talking to adults about their work but hadn’t necessarily talked to teenagers before. We encouraged employer speakers to not be too scripted, to highlight their own experiences in high school, and to show the diversity of their industry – in terms of gender, ethnicity, job roles, and educational pathways. If there was more than one way to get from A to B, we wanted the panels to show that.
Setting up the tech
There’s no digital career exploration without a digital platform, so while we were recruiting employers, we were simultaneously building our tech toolkit. First, we created a simple website so students and teachers could see at a glance the line-up of employer speakers. Second, we did a lot of research to select the best platform for presenting the sessions. We needed something that students were familiar with and would support both live-streaming and hosting recorded videos – since we knew not all students would be able to watch at the same time every day. It needed to allow a live-stream audience of any size without expensive fees. It needed to be easy to view on mobile phones, so students could watch even if they did not have wi-fi or a computer at home. It needed to be secure, to protect the privacy of students and ensure we would not be interrupted by “zoombombings.”
We ultimately settled on YouTube – which 85% of teens use and allows you to easily live-stream from Zoom – so we could have the employers call in to Zoom and the students watching simultaneously on YouTube. Because YouTube doesn’t allow live comments on videos made for kids, we also made an Instagram account and where students could submit questions live via our CareerConnect@Home Instagram story. Instagram is ubiquitous with teens, so we encouraged them to follow us and get reminders about daily sessions.
Spreading the word
To get the word out about CareerConnect@Home to students, we relied on trusted messengers the students would already know – like teachers and community organizations. We worked with the Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction to spread the word at their existing meetings with teachers and CTE directors, and asked the Career Connect Washington Regional Networks to share the event with their partners and contacts. We asked YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, local governments, and libraries to share with their youth programs. The Governor and the Superintendent of Public Instruction also helped us create some buzz in the press.
The initial results: 5000 views and growing
Image: CareerConnect@Home with SEHAmerica, a leader in advanced manufacturing in Vancouver, WA; featuring two current SEH apprentices)
When we initiated the YouTube livestream for our first session, we saw how our organizing efforts had paid off. Over 130 viewers tuned in for our first session with Zillow. Just ten days later, that video now has nearly 1,000 views. And as of May 21, the CareerConnect@Home Youtube channel has had over 5,000 views across 14 sessions and growing each day. We have over 300 subscribers to the YouTube channel, which did not even exist four weeks ago.
We’re also seeing impact with students and teachers: A high school senior who watched our session on electrical careers reached out to us and we were able to connect him to the IBEW electrical apprenticeship training center. An IB Business Management teacher in Issaquah made watching videos from our entrepreneurship week a required part of her class – leading to some very detailed questions for employers. The videos continue to exist on our website and YouTube channel after the live session, so students can watch them on their own schedule. It’s not unusual for a video to have four or five times as many views within 24 hours of being posted.
Even as the pandemic starts to recede, we think the digital classroom is going to be with us for a while. We hope CareerConnect@Home demonstrates how career exploration can thrive in the digital environment and complement the virtualization work of other partners like the North Central Washington STEM Network’s Digital STEM Showcase. We also hope that digital career programs get students to keep imagining, planning, and learning about the person they want to become, even while they’re dealing with the COVID-19 quarantines. The question that at the heart of our worksite tours remains just as important today as it was before the virus, and now it’s at the heart of CareerConnect@Home – what do you want your future to be?