To be honest with you, it just made my life a bit easier. When I'm tasked with trying to push a program across a group of 250 students at one time, it's great to have a program that the teachers can easily pick up and run with, and that makes both their life and my life easier.

The Next Big Thing

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01

How is your careers program structured?

Ellenbrook Secondary College’s careers program is integrated into the whole school. For example, there are elements of career education implemented within the English departments curriculum where the students are taught resume writing and how to complete a cover letter.

Lower school careers education has been integrated into year 9 and 10 as part of the HASS program and runs for a two-week block twice a year at the end of Term 2 and 4.

In upper school, Ellenbrook delivers general Career and Enterprise along with an extensive list of VET courses including Cert III in Tourism and Cert II Hospitality.

In the last 12 months, the Year 9s have also been part of the WA Career Taster Program which is designed to expose the students to more industry specific content and allow them to explore future career pathways.

CASE STUDY

We sat down with Iain McAlpine, Career Practitioner at Ellenbrook Secondary College to learn about how he used The Careers Department's e-Portfolio with VET students (year 9 focus through Careers Taster Program)

Champion: Iain McAlpine, Career Practitioner

SNAPSHOT

State

WA

About

Government, Metro

Enrolment

1200

Active Teachers

11 Active Students

400 Focus

Year 9 Career Taster Program

02

How do you implement TCD at Ellenbrook Secondary College?

I needed something to help with the Year 9 Career Taster program, so I got TCD involved and found that the program really ticked a lot of boxes for what I was looking to do.

I put together a two-week program for the end of the year for all HASS classes with lesson plans and a guide for teachers to follow. The students focused on the Virtual Work Experience tasks because that linked in with my Career Taster program.

03

Do your VET students use the e-Portfolio tool?

After we ran the Year 9 Careers Taster program, the staff that were using TCD saw an opportunity to integrate it into other classes around the school. One of the areas that we're looking at using TCD for is with our VET students, and in particular, the tourism Teachers were really interested in some of the skills that you could complete within TCD because they could check them off as part of the units of competency within that VET course.

With regards to the e-portfolio, I thought it was outstanding. The students found it easy to personalise it, and they could store a lot of their information including their Resume, Certificates, or any other work they've done in class and then share that link with potential employers to help them get their first job.

Within the Department of Education, we've had Individual Pathway Plans, which have been around for a decade or more. They're really good, but they're hard to store. They're supposed to be done from Year 7 to Year 12, and then the students reflect on their pathway plans. I think if we saved those as PDFs into this e-portfolio, it would be an excellent place for the students and the teachers to go back and reflect on them.

04

How has TCD been beneficial for you?

Well, for me, to be honest with you, it just made my life a bit easier. When I'm tasked with trying to push a program across a group of 250 students at one time, it's great to have a program that the teachers can easily pick up and run with, and that makes both their life and my life easier.

Things like the resume builder are great because I have students knocking on my door consistently saying, "Can you help me create a resume?". I could just sit down with them and show them how to use TCD’s Resume builder. I even advertised the resume builder on our ‘Ellenbrook Weekly’ newsletter, I did a step-by-step video on how to use it so the students could go off and use it independently.

My students also loved the tab on the front screen that shows them jobs in the local area that were available. They commented on how up to date the program was because of this live API feature! The locality of these jobs made them want to go away and update their Resumes within the builder – I loved to see it!

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05

How do other teachers in your school use TCD?

After the Careers Taster program, I noticed that some of the teachers went in and had a look at some of the other functions that were available. Some of the teachers started using the Graduate Tours, which are short videos interviewing people about their roles and what a typical day looks like for them across 33 different industries. These videos were great for the start of a lesson because I found that they helped students mentally prepare for the class and made them more engaged in the lesson because they could see some relevance in what they're about to do.

06

How did students find the program?

I was pleasantly surprised at how many of my students were sitting there with their headphones in, completely engaged! They particularly loved the ‘Amazing Race’, which is basically a good introductory lesson to get the students to navigate around the platform and see how it all works, step-by-step. They were instantly hooked and focusing on the activities that were asked of them. I then had quite a few of the students come and show me their certificates that they had received doing the activities and they were very excited by that!

Does this school's rollout sound like how you would like to implement The Careers Department?

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