Give Students the College & Career Planning Resources They Need

Many young people approaching adulthood have a sense of what they want to do with their lives, but aren’t exactly sure how to get there. For many, college is a great start, but first-time, full-time freshmen have a dropout rate of around 23%; lack of support, academic challenges, and financial difficulties are among the many reasons why students abandon college. As such, K–12 schools and higher education institutions alike are faced with the question of how to make sure students not only stay in school, but also how to help them plan their future careers and put them on the right academic paths to reach their goals.

To help solve this problem, many schools and colleges, often in partnership, are starting new initiatives that give students as early as middle school the opportunity to follow pathways, or focused series of courses, to help better prepare them for both college and their future careers. These pathways provide students with additional support to help them navigate high school and college.

Help students explore, plan, prepare for, and find high-wage, high-growth jobs and careers. Infobase has educational resources that support students as they research careers, explore higher ed and apprenticeship options, and build the background knowledge they’ll need to reach their destinations. 

Use Video On Demand to Prepare Students for Careers and Jobs

Infobase’s Video On Demand solutions each feature content that can help students prepare for their futures through 2031. 

Learn360

Learn360 for K–12 schools and districts features cross-curricular, age-appropriate content that allows students to explore career ideas, make real-world connections, and develop skills, including Learn360’s Career Development Topic Center. Users can find videos on how to search for jobs, build a CV, and craft a cover letter as well as Career Q&A videos that interview people in different fields, printables and audio recordings to kickstart conversations with younger students about their futures, and more. 

Classroom Video On Demand

Classroom Video On Demand’s Career & Technical Education Video Collection for secondary schools brings together a wide range of career guidance and technical skills-focused videos to support college readiness and vocational training pathways. Students will discover videos on building career and workplace skills from Seven Dimensions, financial literacy and career readiness videos from C.W. Publications, professional training and work safety videos from Channel 1 Creative Media, and much more. 

Films On Demand’s Premium Collections for Career Readiness 

Colleges and universities looking for streaming educational video to help students get the background knowledge they’ll need for their future careers should check out Films On Demand’s collections, including:

• Career & Technical Education: Films On Demand Career and Technical Education Collection is an extensive video library of career guidance and technical skills-focused videos to support college readiness and vocational training pathways by developing students’ media and technical literacy. Discover resources on ever-evolving careers, real-world leaders in emerging fields, and study skill materials to prepare for the future including interview tips, best practices, and résumé resources.
• Nursing  Films On Demand Nursing Collection is a professionally curated streaming video resource that helps students prepare for the NCLEX exam. Find foundational content covering all areas of practice, nursing across the lifespan, professional development, emerging areas, and more. Arm students with the practical and research literacy skills needed to succeed in their future careers.
• Allied Health: Films On Demand Allied Health Collection is a video library that prepares students for practice across a diverse range of healthcare settings. With programs from trusted producers such as Elsevier, NEVCO and Medivision, students can feel confident navigating their information needs, and doing research ethically and with rigor.

Help Students Research Career Paths, Develop Career Skills and Goals, and Gain Valuable Background Knowledge with These Databases

Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center

From newly minted high schoolers starting to consider their future plans to college grads who are about to graduate, the go-to for career and job skill research is Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center. This comprehensive multimedia resource library of career exploration and workplace skills-focused content features articles, videos, and more that are curated to popular career paths, encouraging students to discover careers where they can best apply their strengths and interests to real-world uses of their classroom learning. 

With Ferguson’s, students will find four school searches—including distance learning, graduate, undergraduate, and vo-tech schools—along with two comprehensive financial aid databases and advice articles and videos designed to help them find the schools that are the best fit for their goals and needs and the financial support to attend them. They’ll also find expertly researched, detailed articles on more than 150 industries and more than 1,200 professions with current information on earnings, employment trends, job requirements, and essential skills, as well as apprenticeship and internship advice articles and directories to help them get started. 

Credo Source and Credo Reference

No career can really get off to a great start without basic foundational knowledge in the area you’ll be working in, and research skills are something that everyone needs for professional and personal success well into the future. Credo Source for secondary schools and Credo Reference for higher education can help with both. 

With Credo Source, high school students can research careers and related concepts plus build background knowledge with trusted reference content and research skill-building tools. Credo Reference can help undergrads build foundational knowledge in any field, including business, STEM, nursing, and social science. Both resources feature high-quality videos designed to help students improve their research skills, a Mind Map that encourages exploration and deep dives into topics, and a federated search that opens a doorway to your library’s other resources, giving students access to even more content they can use to build knowledge.

Today’s Science and Science Online

Students interested in the sciences, STEM careers, and how science is applied in the real world should absolutely check out Today’s Science and Science Online. Today’s Science not only features articles with in-depth explanations of important advances in biology, chemistry, environmental science, space, physics, and technology, but it also features a section called “Conversations with Scientists” that showcases exclusive interviews with scientists in the field. With this invaluable resource, students will learn about the career paths that actual scientists followed to achieve their goals as well as the how and why of the scientists’ research. (Maybe one day, you’ll see one of your students being interviewed here!)

Science Online offers a comprehensive overview of a broad range of scientific disciplines with a wealth of expertly researched and written content—an ideal first stop for STEM research and a great place to build the foundational science knowledge future scientists will rely upon. 

Students interested in a specific scientific discipline can start with Science Online’s Topic Centers, which bring together in one place overview articles, key videos and animations, printable experiments, diagrams, key tables and data, and more on the most researched disciplines, including biology, chemistry, computer science, environmental science, and space and astronomy. Science Online also features a wide variety of science experiments, including interactive experiments and some that can be performed at home, that allow students to become scientists themselves. They’ll also find biographies of notable computer scientists, astrophysicists, inventors, engineers, environmentalists, women scientists, astronauts, and mathematicians—including ones they may have never heard of. 

The World Almanac® for Kids and The World Almanac® for Kids Elementary

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” You can help young students start thinking about their future careers with databases such as The World Almanac for Kids for intermediate students and The World Almanac for Kids Elementary for younger students. With The World Almanac for Kids Elementary, you can introduce elementary students to the careers of people they might meet in their neighborhoods—including doctors, teachers, coaches, firefighters, social workers, chefs, and more—with the Community Leaders section. At the intermediate level, The World Almanac for Kids includes a Career Ideas section that presents a wide range of careers for them to explore, from adventurous ones such as astronauts and detectives to careers in the performing arts such as actors and musicians.

Both databases include age-appropriate articles, videos, fun facts, and more on character building and citizenship that will help students in their future workplace as well as in life, as well as biographies of famous people in fascinating professions—artists, adventurers, scientists, great leaders, and more—to inspire them.