Write a career development plan

Ideally you will be looking at writing a career development plan because you identified this as an area for action in a review of your current situation, using the career development benchmarks.

• Step-by-step guide to reviewing your career practice

The career development benchmarks cover writing a career development plan in the following subcategories:

• Year 7 and 8: L1.3 career development plan.
• Secondary: L1.2, L1.3, L1.5 career development vision, policy and plan.
  
  
• Find out more about the Career Development Benchmarks: Year 7 and 8
• Find out more about the Career Development Benchmarks: Secondary

The content you decide to include in your career development plan depends on your school context. Most schools have accepted ways of organising and writing planning and management documents.

We suggest that your career development plan should include, as a minimum:

• a vision for the career development of all students
• a description of what career learning happens, when and where
• a description of what career management competencies students are developing through this learning
• an outline of the data and evidence you plan to use to evaluate effectiveness.

To increase the effectiveness of career development you may also wish to document key policies, systems and procedures.

To build your career development plan follow the steps below. Start small and add to the plan over time.

Your first step is to create a vision for the career development of your students

A vision for the career development of your students can be as simple as a single paragraph stating the knowledge and skills you want them to have when they leave school.

We recommend you clearly link student career development to key school strategies and initiatives. Before beginning to create a vision, consult all important school planning documents. These may include:

• the school's charter
• the school's strategic plan and annual plan
• existing documents related to career development
• goals and plans of other school-wide initiatives
• the NZ Curriculum or Te Marautanga o Aotearoa.

If you do not find any direct connection in these documents to students’ development of career management competencies or the career development programme, check with your senior leaders to find out what it would take to build references into these documents.

To create your vision statement, consider the following questions:

• What are the schooling or year milestones for our students?
• What outcomes do we want for students at each of these milestones?
• What competencies do we want students to develop at school, and take with them when they leave?
• What will we see if our students are successfully developing their career management competencies?
• What is our school-wide delivery approach?
• How do we want to integrate career development into curricular and extra-curricular activities?

Consultation is important. Consult with your local iwi, Māori and Pacific community groups and whānau to drive career objectives.

Describe the career-related learning and support, formal and informal, provided across all school activities. Include curriculum areas, co-curricular programmes, pastoral care, extra-curricular activities, and so on.

For secondary schools, this will include the links between career development and secondary-tertiary transition programmes, such as STAR, Gateway, trades academies and other academic and vocational programmes.

Use any information you collected in your previous review to build up your picture. As well as recording what you are doing now, you could acknowledge any gaps you found and things you would like to add in the future.

Start by creating a high-level overview showing at a glance what career learning occurs, or is planned, at each year level.

Add to that a map of how students are developing their career management competencies through this career learning across their years at school.

All review processes depend on having good evidence. Think about what data and evaluation processes you can use as indicators of the results of career learning in your school.

Could you use student data to chart the impact of some or all career learning?

Think about what data you currently have access to:

• What data does the school gather to report to the Ministry of Education or Tertiary Education Commission that you could use as an indicator of career learning?
• What results do you receive from NZQA or other bodies that you could include?
• What other evidence might help show the school is delivering on your career development vision statement?

How could you collect other evidence to show how things progress over time? Think about:

• staff, student and community feedback about opportunities students have to develop their career management competencies
• examples of students' work, individual or group success stories
• examples of departmental plans and reports.

Tip: consider asking your statistics specialists or perhaps your senior secondary students to help you with data-gathering methodology.

Documenting policies, systems and procedures will help sustain career development. These link strategy to programmes. They explain how you can put your vision into operation. Some areas you cover could include:

• the aims of the student career development programme and its contribution to your school’s mission, strategies and goals, etc
• strategies for Māori, Pasifika and other specific groups of students in your school
• descriptions of systems and procedures.

Examples of the strategies, systems and procedures you may want to cover include:

• how you will identify and engage students at risk of not successfully progressing through the next stages of their education and eventually into work 
• your plan for Māori students to enjoy success as Māori
• how you will engage families and communities with career development
• how your pastoral care systems will support students’ career development
• how you will track students through school and after they leave
• what career spaces, technology and resources are available for students and teachers 
• a timeline or calendar of activities
• staff roles and responsibilities
• financial and asset reporting
• processes for review.

Add evidence and action plans from recent review processes as appendices to your management documents. These will show your journey.

Your management documents will be most effective when they are:

• easy to access and easy to understand
• shared widely
• updated regularly.

The career development benchmarks have supporting resources to help you put together a career development action plan. You can adapt them to suit your school's individual needs and priorities.

• Find out more about the career development benchmarks and supporting resources