Career Connected Programs

Built for the people who work alongside schools

Nonprofits, after-school providers, and community-based organizations reach young people in the hours and spaces schools cannot. Career Connected Programs gives your team the language, materials, and structure to turn that time into career conversations.

WHAT YOU GET

Customized PD
Staff and volunteers learn the career language, the benchmarks, and how to start a conversation with a young person. Training is shaped around your program model, your age range, and the time your people actually have.

Core Material Toolkit
The same cards, posters, and guides used in classrooms. Volunteers sort a RIASEC deck with a young person, pull a question card mid-conversation, or hang a poster in the space where your program meets.

Customized Materials
Materials built for your program, your setting, and the young people you serve. Formats and prompts are adjusted so a mentor, coach, or site coordinator can pick one up and use it that day.

IN PRACTICE: Career Conversations with Big Brothers Big Sisters

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County and the Inland Empire wanted their Bigs to talk with their Littles about work and the future without it feeling like a lesson. We designed a Career Conversations program built for the way a match already spends time together.

Bigs are trained high school volunteers matched with Littles aged six to sixteen, meeting consistently across the school year. We built a collection of games and activities that give both of them the language of RIASEC and a set of prompts to talk through four questions: Who are you? How are you growing? What are your options? Where are you headed?

The theme running through all of it is Be the Hero of Your Life, an invitation for a young person to take ownership of their own story, meet setbacks, and keep going. Activities are playful and built to work across a wide age range, so a match can pick one up during time they already spend together.

Within a few months, most matches were using RIASEC language comfortably. Program leaders asked for more.

Read the full story!

Partner Spotlight: Forging Futures Together, Educators Cooperative and ECESC Partner to Transform Career Learning in Indiana

East Central Education Service Center serves fourteen rural counties in Indiana, where access to career learning often depends on how close a student lives to a resource or an industry hub. ECESC set out to build their own. We designed the structure of the experience, consulted on the contents of each room, and trained the staff who run it.

The Forge Your Future Experience moves middle school students through eight through six rooms, one per RIASEC theme. In each room they build, solve, organize, create, or collaborate, then rate how much the work felt like them. A facilitated reflection closes the day, where students connect what they noticed to steps they can take next. The experience runs on site and in a mobile version that travels to schools across the region.

We also built job cards naming real occupations with local wage and labor market data for East Central Indiana counties, and a set of classroom activities teachers use before and after a visit. More than fifty newly hired career coaches worked through professional learning sessions on RIASEC, open-ended questioning, and the tools they carry back to their school sites.

Read the Full Story!

HOW IT WORKS

1. We learn your program.
Who you serve, how often you meet, and what your staff and volunteers are already doing well.

2. We design the fit.
Benchmarks and frameworks stay the same. The activities, materials, and language get shaped to your setting.

3. We train your people.
PD built for the time your staff and volunteers actually have.

4. We stay with you.
Materials arrive, the program runs, and we adjust based on what your team learns.

Career learning that reaches beyond the school day