How CareerVillage Adds to Classrooms

Speakers: Chanika R. Perry, Director of Education Programs, Hands On Atlanta

Chanika R. Perry: Typically, when we think about career instruction in classrooms, one of the things that comes to mind of course, we have career fairs, we have research activities that we give to students to do a little bit of digging to find out more about their careers. What are the salaries? What is the... Are the educational requirements? I should say, right? So all of the nuts and bolts that might come into play when you think about a career. We invite maybe a subject matter expert into the classroom to talk to our students about careers. And perhaps that's ongoing. Those are traditional, typical things that we think of when we think about careers in classroom instruction. What CareerVillage offers, I think, it's just a way to deepen and broaden the way that we talk about careers and what it means to engage a much broader network of people in that conversation, in that discussion, and for our students, I don't think there's anything more powerful. They want to know, they have all of the questions and they want to be able to ask them, of course, to the people that they trust. But there's something to be said about getting a much broader range of information, particularly if there's no one around you who can really speak to that career that you might be interested in, or that hobby that you are trying to figure out how to convert or translate into a potential career. And so for me, one of the things that I think about with CareerVillage from an educator point of view is that it really does just open that door.