What's My Job? An Effective Career Orientation Program For Middle School Students

[Dr. Ronald G. Shapiro]

What's My Job? An Effective Career Orientation Program For Middle School Students

 

Are you looking for an engaging, highly interactive career orientation program for your students?  If so, What's My Job? An Effective Career Orientation Program For Middle S... may be the perfect program for you. Modeled after, but somewhat different than, the TV show What's My Line, the program features a guest panelist and four student panelists.   The students ask the guest questions about his/her career and attempt to identify the guest's profession based upon the answers received.  The guest then spends some time explaining his/her career to the students. 

What's My Job, like the original What's My Line program also features a Mystery Guest.  For the mystery guest round the mystery guest is typically the parent of one of the students.   In a variation of the mystery guest round on occasion four mystery guests appear.  Three of these guests are a parent of one of the students.  The fourth one is a parent, but not of one of the students.  The student panelists need to specify which mystery guest is their parent.  Typically, students do not correctly identify their parent.  At the conclusion of the panel the guest(s) spend some time explaining their profession.   In addition to providing useful career information, this activity tends to increase parent-student communication. 

 

What's My Job was developed in 2001 for a Bring Daughters and Sons To Work Day.  I have delivered the program several times since then at similar corporate functions as well as at youth group meetings.  In addition to delivering the program personally, I placed it in ERIC many years ago.  Two years ago I placed it in SlideShare.  The SlideShare version of this program has been viewed approximately 12,800 times and the program has been downloaded over 400 times by people from around the globe.   Thus, I thought that it might be of interest to some FTN members.

 

As always, please do let me know if I can be of help to you by providing further information on this, or any of my other career development (such as Activities to Facilitate Career Planning and Gaining Meaningful Employment) and/or Education By Entertainment programs (such as I'm Awesome, But I Have My Limitations) or by bringing my programs to your school.  

 

Ron

Ronald G.Shapiro, Ph. D.