Course Description:

This course teaches students how to develop and achieve personal goals for future learning, work and community involvement. Students will assess their interests, skills and characteristics and investigate current economic and workplace trends, work opportunities, and ways to search for work. The course explores post-secondary learning and career options, prepares students for managing work and life transitions, and helps students focus on their goals through the development of a career plan and post-secondary budget.

Aims and Objectives:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the skills, strategies, and habits that can contribute to success in the pursuit of educational and career/life opportunities and the achievement of a healthy school/life/work balance.
• Apply various decision-making strategies to help them set goals, reflecting on and documenting their goal-setting process.
• Demonstrate an understanding, based on research, of a variety of local and global trends related to work and employment, including the effect some of those trends have had on workers' rights and responsibilities and the role of transferable skills in career development today.
• Develop a personal profile based on an exploration of their interests, values, skills, strengths, and needs, and examine the range of factors that can influence their future education and career/life opportunities.
• Taking personal profile into account, explore, research, and identify a few post-secondary destinations of interest, whether in apprenticeship training, college, community living, university, or the workplace, and investigate the secondary school pathways that lead to those destinations.
• Develop a plan for their first post-secondary year, whether in apprenticeship training, college, community living, university, or the workplace, and prepare a variety of materials for communicating their strengths and aspirations to prospective mentors, program administrators, employers, and/or investors.
• Demonstrate an understanding of responsible management of financial resources and of services available to support their financial literacy as they prepare a budget for their first post-secondary year.
• Assist students in choosing a major and/or career path during their lives as students.
• Develop students in seeking out opportunities to gain experience within their chosen career fields. (through part-time jobs, internships, clinical rotations, student teaching, job shadowing, etc.)
• Train students in learning about job opportunities in their intended career path.
• Develop life-long skills students can use to seek jobs, internships, apply to graduate school and make career changes.
• Increase students’ understanding of how their academic learning and career development are intertwined inseparable elements of the student experience.
• Identifying skills and personal attributes commonly required by employers from a general list of skills and personal attributes commonly required by employers, identify skills and/or personal attributes.
• Identify and evaluate the skills or qualities a student needs to develop to improve his employment prospects.
• Identify and describe appropriate career paths.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the skills and attributes required to maintain and successfully develop in employment.
• Demonstrate an understanding of employability skills and personal attributes with job selection methods.
• Review and evaluate your attributes and employability skills which are necessary for successful employment and career development.

Expectations:

• Skills, Strategies, and Habits Needed to Succeed

By the end of this course, students will:

1. Outlining student learning about the skills, strategies, and habits that will contribute to long-term individual success and well-being.
2. Development of decision-making strategies and apply them throughout the course.
3. They will also focus on skills and strategies that support adaptability and resilience.

• Exploring and Preparing for the World of Work

By the end of this course, students will:

1. Exploration of the changing nature of work and the transferable skills they need to pursue work opportunities, with a focus on opportunities in key growth areas.
2. Investigation of how digital media use and a social media presence can influence students’ career/life opportunities.
3. Assessment and reflection on students’ skills, values, and interests, developing a personal profile and taking it into account in their education and career/life planning, and they explore opportunities within their communities and beyond.

• Planning and Financial Management to Help Meet Post-Secondary Goals

By the end of this course, students will:

1. Application of information gathered throughout the course to set a goal (or goals) for student's first year after secondary school.
2. Development of students’ initial plan for fulfilling their goal(s), and then consolidate their discoveries and learning by preparing various materials related to applying for a job, internship, apprenticeship, scholarship, education or training program, or another next step of their choice.
3. Development of students's financial literacy, teaching them about the importance of responsible management of financial resources. Among other things, they learn about the different forms of saving and borrowing and the risks and benefits associated with each as they create a budget for their first year after secondary school.

Unit-wise Progression:

Teaching/Learning Methodologies:

Helping students become self-directed, a lifelong learner is a fundamental aim of the guidance and career education curriculum. When students are engaged in active and experiential learning strategies, they tend to retain knowledge for longer periods and develop meaningful skills. Active and experiential learning strategies also enable students to apply their knowledge and skills to real-life issues and situations.

In the guidance and career education program, teachers provide students with opportunities to develop self-knowledge and make connections with the world around them. Students learn how to work independently and with others as they acquire the essential skills and work habits needed for success in school, in the workplace, and daily life. Students learn how to make decisions about future learning and work, how to put plans into action responsibly, and how to reflect on the actions they’ve taken and revise their plans as necessary. They learn by doing. They synthesize what they have learned by reflecting, analyzing, evaluating, making decisions, and setting goals. 

Ultimately, students learn to take responsibility for their learning in preparation for life beyond secondary school. It is essential to emphasize the relationship of guidance and career education to the world outside the classroom so that students recognize that what they learn in these courses can have a significant influence on the rest of their lives, from their educational choices to decisions about their careers and personal lives.

a wide variety of instructional strategies are used to provide learning opportunities to accommodate a variety of learning styles, interests and ability levels. These include:

• Electronic simulation activities
• Video presentations
• Discussion boards and email
• Assessments with real-time feedback
• Interactive activities that engage both the student and teacher in the subject
• Peer review and assessment
• Internet Instructional Videos

E-Learning Approach:

E-learning is not only a training method but it is a learning method that is tailored to individuals. It is found that different terminologies have been used to define learning that takes place online which actually makes difficult to develop a generic definition.

E-learning includes the delivery of content via Internet, Intranet, and Extranet, satellite broadcast, audio-video tape, interactive TV and CD-ROM. The term implies that the learner is at a distance from the tutor or instructor, that the learner uses some form of technology.

With attention to this new system of education that is spreading across the globe it’s imperative that the content of such study programs are enhanced and modified to serve both the learner and the instructor well whilst dealing with the gap of conventional studying methodologies. Thus the courses promise its reader an experience full of engagement, student-concentric approach, personalization and Interaction.  Using a wide array of multimedia tools, cloud based LMS and diverse repository of subject tailored audio-visual material that student can utilize and learn in a stimulated work environment where he’s in charge of his work hours.

Our e-learners paddle through these courses in the mediation of skilled mentors to the finish line with understanding of their subject’s application into real world problems following a futuristic model of education.

Strategies for Assessment and Evaluation of Student Performance:

Assessment is the ongoing gathering of information related to the individual student’s progress in achieving the curriculum expectations of the course. To guide the student to his/her optimum level of achievement, the teacher provides consistent and detailed feedback and guidance leading to improvement. Strategies may include:

• Diagnostic assessment
• Formative assessment
• Summative assessment
• Performance assessment
• Portfolio assessment
• Rubrics
• Checklists

The final grade will be based on:

Resources Required by the Student:

• Microsoft Suite (Word, Excel, Power-point etc.)
• A laptop, or Mac, or Android, or any other operating system functional enough to use the web browser and use online software.
• Curriculum Reference: Career Studies, The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12, 2010 (Revised)