How Can We Link Curriculum With Careers?

By Adam Herbertson

As part of the statutory requirements in schools, all subject teachers should link curriculum with careers. Throughout their studies, every student should be informed about how each subject they are studying can help them gain entry to (and be more successful in) a wide range of occupations. Research shows that students feel more engaged in learning when they can see why it is relevant to people’s lives, which directly links to our school goal of lessons being student-centred. They also become more aspirational when they are more aware of the potential pathways available to them. Subject teachers are highly influential, students are 18 times more likely to be motivated to learn if teachers know their ambitions for the future.

One of the key ways to achieve this benchmark is to include links to careers in unit plans. This can be done by including how the subject, and individual topics, relate to specific careers and highlighting how content and themes link to essential skills, pathways and roles. Some other tips to link careers to your lessons include:

• Highlighting essential skills development in your subject area

• Highlighting pathways at 16/18 from your subject

• Identifying jobs roles/sectors that link to your subject

• Creating careers display boards

• Creating career bios for teachers within the department

• Giving school trips a careers focus e.g. asking an external person on the trip to speak about their career to the students

• Involving family members or alumni in homework projects e.g. students speak to them about their jobs/careers and complete an assignment about it

• Involving guest speakers in classes e.g. having external employees or alumni come in from careers linked to the subject come into lesson to speak about their careers

We are required to track all careers interactions for students and I will be using Unifrog to log these. If you do arrange any employer visits to lessons, school trips to workplaces or involving careers, workshops taken part in etc. please let me know! 

Unifrog has several useful resources to link curriculum to careers. There will be Unifrog-related sessions in Personal Development each term for each year group to help students start to use Unifrog regularly. Additionally, there are many different resources you can use in lessons. By going on unifrog.org and scrolling down to ‘student side’, you can see how the website looks to students. From there, if you click on careers library, you can search for keywords or search by school subjects and you will see a wide range of careers. As an example, here is the profile for a nurse including: day-to-day duties, working hours and environment, career path and progression, skills required, entry requirements, labour market information (for Westminster, London and the UK) and much more. These job profiles can be included in lessons and linked to specific units. You, and students, can also access the subjects library to find degrees linked to different subjects and see various information on how students can get into that subject and how to prepare for it. There are also a wide range of subject-related videos, articles etc. in the read, watch, listen section.

If you have any questions or need any support, please come and speak to me!