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 Streaming Video to Prepare Students for Careers and Jobs
Infobase’s streaming video platforms 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.
Career & Technical Education Video Collection
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 premium collections, including:
- Career & Technical Education Collection: This collection offers the best videos on career exploration, computer science and IT, technical education, visual and performing arts, fashion, guidance and counseling, trade skills, and hospitality and tourism from exclusive producers such as Shopware, Cambridge Educational, and Meridian Educational. The collection also meets Perkins guidelines, making it a must for any university’s career center or counseling department.
- Nursing Collections: Both professionally curated and organized, the Nursing Core Collection and the Nursing Current Concepts and Practices Collection are designed to help to prepare students for NCLEX by combining coverage of evergreen topics in nursing instruction with the most current concepts and practices in nursing today. Students will find more than 1,000 videos from trusted producers—including Elsevier, Medivision, Classroom Productions, Focus Medica, and more—covering all major classes at RN and BSN levels and beyond.
- Allied Health Collection: This collection will help prepare future allied health professionals for practice across a diverse range of health care settings, covering basic anatomy, medical technology, patient care, health care professionalism, and more. The videos include titles from trusted producers such as Elsevier, NEVCO, Center for Phlebotomy Education, InJoy Health Education, Classroom Productions, Medivision, and others.
Subscribers: log into Learn360, Classroom Video On Demand, or the Films On Demand premium collections today to see this content for yourself.
Not a subscriber? Take a FREE trial!
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.
Subscribers: log into these databases today to take advantage of this content for your classroom.
Not a subscriber? Take a FREE trial!
See also:
- Get Students Ready for Life after Graduation
- Explore Space with Infobase
- 4 Reasons Your Classroom Needs Learn360
- FREE case study: How One High School Library Is Simplifying Student Research and Classroom Instruction
- FREE video: Learn More about Apprenticeships with Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center
- FREE webinar: Launching Careers: Resources and Tools to Help Job Seekers Land Their Dream Jobs
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