he resources

Welcome to Your Career Development Programme for Year 11!

This year you will be working through The Year 11 Career Workbook which is designed to help you start thinking about some BIG QUESTIONS as well as learn RESEARCH SKILLS that you are going to need as you prepare to look at options for study after you've finished at Island School and in your future career.

Ever heard of people getting a "lucky break"?

Very often that luck is about the preparation put in beforehand + recognising an opportunity when it arises.

That is, when someone has put in preparation such as building skills, getting useful qualifications, and undertaking work or volunteer experience then they are ready to recognise and seize opportunities when they arise!

In your workbook you will find references to this page. These are indicated by a sign in your workbook. We encourage you to share your careers research with your parents, your tutor and the Higher Education Team and your parents. (In fact, we've attached a fantastic Canadian based resource for parents to this page just for your parents!)

Take the time to have discussions about what you've learned. These conversations will often give you valuable insights into further matters you can research and consider towards potential career development, subjects you might take as part of your higher education studies and even more importantly what you would like to study in Years 12 and 13.

Finally, you should notice that each Part of this page has a corresponding section in your workbook so it should be really easy to see what resources are available to support you.

Career conversations

This is where having conversations about your ideas is really important. By talking to a professional working in a career field you are interested in or to people studying or teaching a course related to that field you can find out a lot of practical and useful information.

Ask your parents, friends or your Higher Education Counsellor to help you find contacts and arrange an “information interview". This is where you talk to someone who is working in the field you are interested in. Your workbook has some suggestions as to questions you can ask. Think about the answers!

Take note of interesting points - do they make the career more or less appealing to you? Do you know more about whether the career would meet the criteria you identified at the beginning of step 4? Have you got notes of areas you want to do some further research on? What about work experience or some job shadowing? This is a great way to get in depth and real experience to help you determine if this is the field you want to pursue.

Many students express concern that they do not know how to do an information interview. But YOU do! Remember those conversations you had at the Careers Fair before? Yes, those were all a form of information interview.

Considering Courses

As you begin your research into different educational options available to you to help you develop towards your chosen career ideas you will discover that different countries have different university degree programmes, a course or major with a similar name can have quite dissimilar content and so on… You may find that you like the idea of some very different careers so you may want to look at extending your education so that you have a broad knowledge base that could take you in many career directions …

Your AIM at this stage is to explore courses that will help you gain experience or build skills for those careers you have an interest in and researched. Don’t worry if you are not sure whether any of those careers are your ideal – to be uncertain is very normal – what’s great though is that you are developing your research skills so

you can find out more… Some great links to help you explore educational fields are:

• UCAS Course Search (UK)

• Big Future and My Majors (USA)

• Future Unlimited (Australia)

Save the course outlines of your chosen fields and put this information in a careers folder for later reference. Compare course outlines for similar courses. - Note the entry requirements or "prerequisites" – In the USA prerequisites are less commonly required except in some specific cases, such as Engineering where some IB subject combinations are desirable. Once you have your data complete the table with the information from your research.

Planning on Higher Education in the UK?

In the case of the UK, entry requirements are identified by course.

Example - If I am interested in studying medicine at University of Leeds...

• Step 1 - Go onto the UCAS website

• Step 2 - Search under 2014 courses

• Step 3 - Look at the Entry Profile - this will tell you some details about the course and the university

• Step 4 - Look at the Entry Requirements - these will tell you what you need to have achieved at both GCSEs and IB or BTEC level & the subjects that are prerequisites for entry. In many cases these are minimum requirements!

So for our Medicine at University of Leeds example, I can see that I would need to achieve 36 IB points overall.

In planning which courses to take for my IB in year 12 and 13 I also know that to be able to apply to this university for this course I would need to make sure that my subject choices included HL Chemistry.