Building a Path to a Career in Business or Technology

This course discusses the preparation steps necessary that will take you from your days as a student to a gainfully employed individual with a forward thinking career.  At the end of the course, each student will have a letter of introduction/cover letter, resume and educational path plan to get them where they want to go.  The skills learned in this course can also be used during the college application process.

This is the basic breakdown of the course:

Week 1: What do you want to do with your life?
- Through discussion and a fun quiz-like interface students will identify their strengths and passions.
- We will discuss how to track accomplishments and achievements that are beneficial moving forward into high school and post-high school education.  
- We will help to define the differences between a job, a career and just "getting by."  
- What is the difference between hourly, part-time salaried, full-time salaried and contracting?  Why do one over the other?
- We will discuss the differences between a high school diploma, trade school training, professional certifications and various levels of college degrees.  We will talk through different potential opportunities that present themselves at different stages of your education in middle school, high school and college and why taking advantage of these can help.
- Homework will consist of making a chart of things you are good at, things you love and things you are willing to do to get where you want to go.

Week 2: How do you get where you want to go?
- We will go over the charts from the homework assignment to sort through the answers, pick out the skills that speak to careers and talk about the educational path necessary to get into that career.  We will use the information from the charts to start building skills and achievements to use in our resume.
- We will look at different educational paths that lead to different terminal places within different career paths in business and technology.  
- Compare different job boards - what is the difference between Monster, Dice, Indeed and Glassdoor?  Are there trade specific job boards?
- Homework will consist of choosing a career, researching job listing that pertains to that job/career path and then write a one page (three paragraphs of at least 4 sentences) that explains the job, why it is important and what level of education is necessary to break into that career path.  In the summary, identify what educational path you think is going to get you to your goal.

Week 3: What gets you the interview?
- Students will read their summary to the class.  We will discuss each 
- Social media and the job market - we will discuss how the use of social media can impact job prospects in both positive and negative ways.  We will talk about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and ePortfolios.
- Taking the chosen jobs/career paths from the summaries, we will look at how to craft a letter of introduction/cover letter.  We will talk about what should be in the letter, how it should be phrased and what keywords get the attention of the hiring managers.
- We will look at different resume styles and go over the basic format of the professional resume.  We will also take a look at how a social media resume such as an ePortfolio or LinkedIn profile can work hand-in-hand with your resume to help you get into college/trade school and then a job.
- Homework: Each student will be given a resume template to use and write a letter of introduction/cover letter and create your own resume.

Week 4: Putting it all together.
- Preparing for an interview: what to bring, what to wear, what to do!
- Each student will read their cover letters and turn in both their cover letter and resume.
- We will discuss how to improve the impact of the cover letters and help craft a template to use in the future.
- Each resume will be read over with comments made and returned to the student by the end of the course.  The returned resume will also include recommendations regarding the educational path towards the career chosen.

Each class session will be recorded and available for student reference.