National Career Awareness Project

The National Career Awareness Project, funded by OVAE and managed through LINCS Region 1 Regional Resource Center will improve the capacity of adult educators to deliver career awareness instruction and counseling using the Integrating Career Awareness into the ABE/ESOL Classroom (ICA) Curriculum Guide.  

The overall goal of the National Career Awareness Project is to increase and improve adult learners' career awareness and planning throughout all levels of the ESOL, ABE, and Adult Secondary Education spectrum by helping adult education program staff incorporate career awareness and planning into their instruction and counseling activities.

State teams of local program staff and state team leaders participate in an intensive professional development model, which has two phases and extends over a six-month period.

Phase 1:
Local program staff complete an online course for purposes of examining the curriculum guide, participating in some of the lesson activities found in the guide, and selecting and adapting lessons for use in their own classrooms during the second phase. State team leaders support the local program staff during this phase by identifying state-specific resources, such as labor market data and curriculum standards.

Phase 2:
Local program staff use selected career awareness and counseling activities with students in their own programs and report on the successes and challenges to colleagues from their own states in a virtual community of practice. The state team leaders develop a plan for disseminating career awareness curriculum and professional development within their states, based on learnings gleaned from team members’ implementation experiences.

The first round of the National Career Awareness Project came to a close on June 30, 2011. The state teams that participated in Round 1 were from Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas.  Sixty-one local program staff and eight state team leaders completed the online course.  Fifty-eight of the local program staff from the eight states implemented a set of career planning lessons and activities and completed a staff learning gains self-assessment. Three hundred and forty-eight students participated in a comprehensive set of career planning lessons and activities and completed a learning gains self assessment. The results of the learning gains assessments will be available at the end of the project.

Visit the LINCS Workforce Competitiveness Resource Collection for a review of the ICA curriculum.

For more information contact:  Sandy Goodman, National College Transition Network at World Education, sgoodman@worlded.org.