Teaching Job Skills
Middle school is a crucial time for students to start thinking about their future careers and what they want to do when they grow up. As educators, we must provide our students with the tools and resources they need to make informed decisions about their future careers. One of the best ways to do this is by teaching job skills in middle school. By providing students with hands-on experience and career exploration opportunities, we can help them understand the different career options available to them and make more informed decisions about their future.
Job Skills for Students
While middle school students are not yet ready to look into higher education and figure out their exact career path, the earlier they start thinking about it, the better. This post will focus on two areas: activities to promote job skills and ideas for career exploration.
Job Skills Activities
Two important components of getting a job include writing a resume and completing job interviews. No matter what career path students choose, these steps will be necessary for students to complete. However, teaching students how to write a resume can be tricky. That’s why we created this resume template that does all the work for you! It guides students through the process of writing a resume in an easy-to-understand way. It also includes a corresponding slideshow to provide an overview of each topic.
Hosting mock interviews can also be a useful practice opportunity for job skills. A mock interview helps students get a taste of what a job interview might be like and gives them a chance to practice articulating themselves. They can even practice giving a proper handshake! This kit gives students a list of mock interview questions, a slideshow overview about interviews, a grading sheet, and a sign-up sheet for when you host mock interviews. Once students had completed their resume activity and the mock interview practice questions, I interviewed them one on one. I asked about five questions to each student, tailoring my questions to their desired future job.
Career Exploration Activities
To help students know what job they might be interested in, career exploration is a must! If your school provides access to them, there are some great online quizzes and programs for career exploration out there. Personality tests could also be a useful activity to complement career exploration quizzes. However, if you don’t have access to these tests or are looking for something different, you might like our Career ABC Slideshow. An ABC slideshow is a great activity when you have many topics or ideas to cover, such as different careers.
In this research project, students will create one slide in a Google Slideshow about a job that starts with each letter of the alphabet. Each slide will include key details about each job, such as the job description, the schooling required, and the average salary. After students have all completed their Google Slideshows, they will each present a selection of slides to the class, giving students a chance to learn about even more job opportunities!
After students have completed some career exploration activities, it is helpful to teach them about career trade-offs. While it would be amazing if there were a completely perfect job, that doesn’t exist. Each job has trade-offs… some positive and some negative factors that can affect one’s life. This slideshow and graphic organizer/activity walk students through the topics of salary, work-life balance, impact, hours, location, benefits and insurance, advancement, job security, and more. Students can spend more time researching and applying these different topics to jobs they are interested in to better understand what might be a good fit for their future.
Job Skills in History Classes
The ideas previously described work great in a careers class, but what if you teach history, social studies, or even language arts instead? You might not think that you have time to teach job skills, but there are some unique project ideas that you could apply to any historical unit. For example, you could have students write a resume for a U.S. President (or leader of your respective country), a famous inventor, a social justice activist, or even a character in a book your students have read about. Students can follow the provided template and look up key events and accomplishments from each person. This assignment will teach students about the historical figure and how to set up a resume all at once!
If you are an Ancient Civilizations teacher, we wrote 24 different resumes for important leaders in the ancient world. Resumes include Hammurabi, Hatshepsut, Siddhartha Gautama, Emperor Wu of Han, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and so many more! In this activity, students can read over the resumes and hire the leader they believe would be the best candidate for the selected careers. This resource includes everything you would need to succeed, including several graphic organizers and an explanation of each available job. You can check out the complete bundle here, but the resumes for each unit are also available as separate sets if you prefer.
Classroom Jobs
While classroom jobs can honestly be more about saving yourself time, they still have a place in teaching job skills to middle school students. Students can take on leadership roles in the classroom and gain some additional skills. In this resource, students must complete an application if they are interested in having a classroom job, with 11 job options and business cards that are ready-made!
We hope this post gives you some new ideas about teaching job skills to your middle school. This can be an essential part of preparing your students for their futures, no matter what path they choose!
If you are interested, we also have some other life skills resources described in this blog post for the first week of middle school.
