To get started with the Careers in Your Community Challenge, you don’t need a fully formed idea — and you don’t have to implement your solution to participate. All you need is a good idea.
Start with your students: What careers are they curious about? What opportunities exist in their community? What could make it easier for them to explore those opportunities?
The Resources page has curated tools and guidance to help your team move from exploring local workforce needs to creating a proposal for a new career exploration solution. When you’re ready to turn those questions into an idea, these five steps can help you get started.
Follow these five steps to get started
- Build your team. Bring together the students for your team and school leaders who can give your school permission to participate. Use the challenge handout, FAQs, and email template to get everyone up to speed.
- Explore careers with students. Begin the conversation about how students discover careers and what information they need to make informed choices. Use existing career exploration guides, the classroom conversation starters, and tools like CareerOneStop, My Next Move, and GoZig to spark classroom discussion about how career exploration works today — and where it could be improved.
- Learn from local employers. Have students investigate the industries and opportunities in their community. Use local workforce data, the Occupational Outlook Handbook, and other provided resources to identify what’s available and where students may need better solutions to find or understand those opportunities.
- Turn a need into an idea. Consider: What could we do differently to help students explore careers? Work with your team to brainstorm how you might address a career exploration gap you’ve identified. Use the resources to develop your concept, create an elevator pitch or video, and design a solution that works for all students.
- Plan how you’ll make it happen. Map what it will take to put your idea into practice. Use the project planning template to outline next steps, potential partners and resources, and how you could measure whether your solution is working.
Start with one step
You don’t have to do everything at once. Start by bringing the challenge handout to your students and starting the conversation. Your team can build from there.
When you’re ready, review the challenge details, selection criteria, and sample submission form to see what you’ll need to submit.