A few years ago, Diana Barrios was in a room full of very engaged 8th grade students.
It wasn’t in a classroom during a lecture.
It was at a district-hosted career exploration session called Girls in Industry. At the front of the room, a panel of professionals shared stories about how they got to where they are today.
“They were telling the students who they are and how their values and purpose were intertwined with what they were doing in their profession,” Barrios, a career exploration coordinator for the Houston school district, said during a June 29 presentation at the ISTELive 26 + ASCD annual conference held here from June 28 to July 1.
There was a Hispanic entrepreneur whom one student really gravitated toward, and after the event, the student came up to Barrios and said, “‘I would like to be like her when I grow up.’
“That changed everything for me,” Barrios said.
The “aha!” moment didn’t happen from a formal career assessment or a career interest inventory, she said. It came from hearing about someone’s values and purpose, and how those intersect with their chosen career.
That’s something that’s missing from the conversation around career exploration: a focus on building students’ career identities instead of just exposing them to a range of careers, Barrios said.
Career assessments and interest inventories help students reflect on what they enjoy, what they’re good at, and the real-world problems they want to solve. These are growing in popularity as schools across the country try to meet the rising demand for work-based learning and career and technical education and expose students to potential careers at earlier ages.
Surveys have found that students often will participate and engage in career exploration activities without connecting personally with those careers, she said.
Barrios explained the difference between career exposure and career identity by linking them to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To Barrios, many career exploration opportunities only focus on the two bottom tiers of the hierarchy: physiological and safety needs. Educators often talk to students about high-wage and high-demand, stable careers, she said.
“I’m not going to say that that’s wrong,” Barrios said. “That is absolutely right, and for the students that I work for, that is needed. But it’s incomplete.”
Including conversations about career identity fulfills the three upper tiers (belonging, esteem, and self-actualization), and ultimately, Barrios argued, the highest tier that’s rarely talked about: transcendence. She defines it as getting out of a mindset of meeting one’s own needs and having an impact with others.
“[Whether] you’re conscious about it or not, your job has an impact,” Barrios said. “If we make people understand that their job, what they’re going to choose, has an impact on society, probably they are going to be more conscious and do it right. Probably they’re going to be more connected with the type of professional job that they want to pursue.”
The problem, Barrios said, is that “we never talk to students about, ‘oh, this is the implication [of being] an engineer in society.’”
Career exploration is “not an individual act,” Barrios argued. “It’s a social one.”
To build a career identity, students don’t need more career assessments and interest inventories, Barrios said. They need experiences and connection, “so they can feel the purpose of it.”
During the Girls in Industry event in Houston, students participated in hands-on activities designed by the professionals who attended. Students also had the opportunity to ask the adults about their jobs, and the questions they asked weren’t about salaries, Barrios said. Students asked questions like, “when was the moment you decided to get into this role?”
“Those stories are so powerful for them because they connect with that, and it [shows] them the reality of how to be a professional in the real world,” Barrios said.
