Ensuring Transferability of Skills in Projects and Pathways

Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.

-- Polly B. Berends

School-to-Career is about expanding options for students, opening their eyes to possibilities and ensuring that they have the skills and confidence to succeed, no matter what they do after high school and college. As such, it is critical that students see their projects, career-focused activities, and their participation in pathways and academies as points of departure, not as outcomes. Counselors and career guidance staff—and all those in a school who play these roles—are important players in helping students see the threads connecting learning across projects, across disciplines, across pathways, and across school and outside activities. They can help students see how their skills can be transferred to myriad occupations and endeavors. They can help students recognize what they are good at and what they enjoy. They help students see the “big picture”.

Teachers and counselors can help ensure that the knowledge students acquire and the skills learn are transferable in the following ways.

1. Provide rigorous academic content, and, where possible, adhere to the UC and CSU a-g guidelines.
2. Ensure that pathway and academy themes are sufficiently broad to encompass a wide range of professions and types of activity.
3. Ensure that community and work-based activities cover “all aspects of the industry” and that students have the opportunity to interview and shadow employees and entrepreneurs who perform diverse tasks.
4. Ensure that a broad range of SCANS skills and other cross-cutting skills can be exercised.
5. Assist students in developing the emotional competencies they will need for future success, no matter what paths they choose.
6. Provide lots of opportunity for guided reflection, including identification of skills students used and enjoyed using. The latter are called “motivated skills”; they are the ones that motivate individuals to achieve—in school or in work.