My Go-To Career Development Lesson Plan
I'm a full-time assistant teaching professor at an R2 university, and I'm always looking for ways to make my courses more impactful. One of my favorite lessons, and one that my students consistently say makes a real difference, is my career development unit.
You can catch me talking about setting up my planner and this lesson plan on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/5S6FEOmQ-VM
In our line of work, we're all about empowering students. That’s the heart of what we do at Teacher's PET too – helping you build productive, personalized, and engaging courses without burning yourselves out. This career development lesson fits right in, especially for those first and second-year students who are just starting to figure things out. My students, who are mostly in engineering, computer science, and cyber programs, get so much out of it.
Kicking Things Off: Real Talk and Real Journeys
I’ve found that the best way to start talking about careers is to be super transparent. Students often have these, you know, abstract ideas about what a career looks like, often based on those big median salary numbers they see. They don't always see the winding road it can take to get there.
Activity 1: Sharing Our Stories (The Good, The Bad, and The Paychecks!)
So, the first thing I do in my 75-minute lab session for my hybrid "Intro to Technical Writing" class is just open up about my own career path and my spouse's. I post screenshots of our LinkedIn/Resume’s to the slide deck with tags on each step for our career journeys.
As I move up the ladder from our first internships in college to our current positions, I share honestly with the room:
Real Job Details: I talk about what we actually did in our various jobs.
Salary Transparency: This one can feel a bit weird, I know, but I share the actual salaries and pay scales we had at each step. I think it’s so important for students to get realistic, concrete examples from mentors.
The "How We Got Here": I discuss promotions, why we made certain career moves, and the timeline of it all.
Last, I actually graph out our salary progressions. It clearly shows how his path in the private tech sector (starting lower but with bigger jumps and a higher overall line) differs from my more steady, lower path in education.
My students really appreciate this honesty. They’ve told me it helps them set more realistic expectations and even motivates them to get more out of their college experience. It's all about giving them that eyes-wide-open understanding of what to expect.
Giving Them the Toolkit for Exploration
After we’ve had that real talk, it’s time to give them tools to figure things out for themselves. I ask my students to get their laptops or phones out at this point (also I teach in a computer lab), so they can take notes and access the websites in the next few activities. These could be done on pen and paper or in groups, if technology access is an issue for your class.
Activity 2: The Personal Audit (PALMS)
I use the PALMS audit, a system from 101 Career Myths Debunked (Elizabeth Campbell). https://books.google.com/books/about/101_Career_Myths_Debunked.html?id=rv_fzgEACAAJ
As I explain each of the aspects for the audit, I share real examples from myself as a model.
Personality traits
Abilities they have
Likes and Dislikes
Meanings and values (what kind of work do they want to contribute to?)
Supplemental factors
They spend about five or six minutes jotting down notes in a little table. It’s a quick way to get them thinking about themselves. I’ll walk around and help them brainstorm industries or career fields that apply to their audit.
For example, often my students in a Cybersecurity program will say they really love sports and athletics. So I help them brainstorm what types of cyber concerns and jobs a professional sports team or an athletic gear company might need to hire and staff. I’ve found most students are very narrowly focused on the major companies or fields while missing how to intersect their skills, majors, and passions.
Activity 3: Digging into Career Options
Next, they pick two potential career areas they're interested in and set up a new table to compare them. We look at:
Outlook and Salary: Using sites like the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Key Verbs & Responsibilities: O*NET OnLine (onetonline.org) is fantastic for this – it breaks down job titles into actual tasks, tools, and skills.
Regional Salary Data: I show them how to find salary info specific to states or regions.
They spend about 20 minutes exploring, taking notes, and comparing this info to their personal audit. It’s so cool to see them making connections and sometimes even discovering new job titles they hadn’t considered.
Making College Count: The Bigger Picture
One of the most eye-opening parts for them, I think, is when we talk about just how competitive the job market is.
Activity 4: So, You Have a Degree… Now What?
I do this mini-game where I ask them how many universities they think are in the US. Their guesses are all over the place – from 50 to 200,000! It shows they don’t always realize how many people are graduating with degrees.
The goal isn't to scare them, but to light a fire and show them that what they do during college—internships, projects, networking—really matters. The discussion opens up to the resources from my college’s Career Center, the events and opportunities from their home department websites (and most of them have ignored their major’s mixers or networking events so far), the list of clubs and student organizations, and when to look for internships.
And finally, I end the day with a very direct review of our concepts and units from class. I give them example language of how to use a project or story from the semester when answering common interview questions (and then they practice asking and answering with each other). I also provide examples of how to add their work to a portfolio or as a “Special Communication Projects” section on a resume for those without other experience options yet.
The check out question for the day that I like to use becomes: "Now that you know this, how are you going to use your next few years to make yourself more competitive and unique?”
I want them to think critically about what they plan to do on this campus to work towards their goals.
This whole career development unit is something I weave into my technical writing course. It’s a natural fit because they're already learning about research and clear communication. I also bring in other resources, like a recorded Q&A video with my husband answering past student questions about his career change into tech (he is the engineering power behind Teacher’s PET), and I point them to an e-book our library has called "101 Career Myths."
This lesson plan is something I'm really passionate about because it directly speaks to our Teacher's PET mission: empowering educators to build courses that really prepare students for success by using tools and methods that are common sense and don’t require a ton of extra training. It’s about helping them see how they can redesign their own paths for a balanced, efficient, and fulfilling professional life.
What do you think about giving our students this kind of insight and these tools early on in their degree programs? That's a win in my book, but I’m curious how, when, and if you approach the classroom-to-career conversation.
What are some of your favorite ways to talk about career development with your students? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below! Until then, I hope you have a great class 🐝
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