Career Awareness- Career awareness helps students discover their interests and strengths and provides exposure to a wide range of career possibilities.

Career Exploration- Career exploration allows students to investigate careers and make connections between their learning and occupation options that align with their interests and life goals.

Career Preparation- Career preparation is a more focused examination of career pathways, labor market demand, and postsecondary opportunities that support students in refining their career aspirations.  At this stage, students are building pathway-specific skills and are empowered to make decisions, take action, and move toward their goals.

Career Training- Career training involves collaboration with industry and postsecondary partners to build student competency and skills in a specific occupation.

Career Zones- The six Michigan Career zones are broad groupings of careers that share similar characteristics and whose employment requirements call for many common interests, strengths, and competencies.

Career Clusters- Michigan has seventeen subgroups from the six career zones, including occupations organized around knowledge and skills with common characteristics and job duties.  The career clusters are based on the National Career Clusters® Framework and are useful when developing programs of study bridging secondary and postsecondary systems and for creating individual student plans of study for a complete range of career options.

Career Pathways- A career pathway is a group of related career specialties or occupations within the career cluster.  There are 79 career pathways in Michigan.

Educational Development Plan (EDP)- An Educational Development Plan is a living document based on the student's evolving interests, skills, abilities, and values.  The EDP is developed cooperatively between the student, school staff members, and family members to identify career goals and make an action plan to reach those goals.  By going through the EDP process, students will:

• Learn about themsevles

• Explore career options and use labor market information to learn about in-demand occupations

• Make connections between the skills being learned to the skills needed in a future world of work

• Make informed decisions to select courses and experiences that align with their chose career field

• Understand the relevance between high school and preparation for entering college or the workforce

• Establish and reflect upon career and life goals

Students must initiate the EDP in 7th grade, review it during 8th grade, and update it annually.  

Talent Portfolio- The talent portfolio is a collection of artifacts that allows a student to "show what they know" and shall include a record of the student's experiences, proficiencies, certifications, digital badges, and accomplishments, that demonstrate talents or marketable skills.