This is the first in our series of 'Pathways takeaways' looking at the Next Generation reports produced by UCAS. This initial snippet will focus on why its so important to provide young people with the knowledge to enable them to make informed decisions about their future course and career choices.
Young people today, no matter of age or gender, are well versed in being research independent. If you offer them the information on course / career choices in your website it will enable them to make better decisions at earlier stages of the education process.
The Project Next Generation report from UCAS shows that of students in Year 12 (less than 2 years away from their post-secondary life) 59% have given only ‘a little consideration’ at most to what they will do after they turn 18.
This is problematic because of how the interconnectedness of education and training choices link to career possibilities. Infact 1 in 5 students close the door to course and career choices they may want to take in the future due to their subject selection post 14 and 16.
It is of course understandable as to why so many young people are unable to make firm decisions about thier career choices, as they have limited knowledge of the world of work and quite often individual jobs can seem too specific for many young people to want to commit to.
As a result of this it can be useful to introduce them first to the concept of career sectors where multiple types of jobs and disciplines exist under one sector. This can be a great starting point to engage in their broader interests and discover relevant careers.
How we can help
Use Pathways Explore on your website to help engage and educate prospective students and their parents by allowing them to research over 850 different job roles.
The job roles can be searched individually if students know which job they are interested in or they can be filtered by job sector, allowing them to discover many different roles within the sector. Where relevant, each job role is mapped to your courses, allowing students to see the relationship between the occupation and courses you offer.
Pathways Explore also includes a 30 question quiz which identifies interests and applies one of six different personality types to the student. It then displays relevant job roles based on their interests and how they have answered the questions.
Find out more information about Pathways Explore
