During this week’s ASU-GSV conference, held in San Diego, CA, The Myers-Briggs Company Innovation Labs and Cajon Valley Unified School District announced an exciting new World of Work (WOW) partnership aimed at engaging K-12 students, teachers, and parents in the WOW framework by providing tools to make informed and intentional decisions in a rapidly changing landscape of occupations and opportunities.
Through this new initiative, the Innovation Labs’ VitaNavis® analytics and learning platform enables more students than ever to find potential education and career pathways, starting by providing them with a lifelong framework for understanding how their interests align with future occupations and opportunities. Generally, most students are exposed to a very limited view of the world’s possibilities, a circumstance which the World of Work Network intends to change.
With the VitaNavis platform, students realize their own path in the world, allowing them to begin building future-ready skills and competencies from an early age. The student and parent experience on VitaNavis begins with the SuperStrong® assessment, the latest, rapid and mobile version of the Strong Interest Inventory® assessment. Data derived from the SuperStrong assessment is scientifically validated and reliable, allowing students to confidently explore careers, salaries, job outlooks, skills, and education requirements.
In Cajon Valley USD schools, where the K12 World of Work launched, students begin in kindergarten to explore different interests and apply them in “real world” scenarios, showing how their interests relate to their “future possible selves.” By envisioning themselves in the future world of work, students engage with today’s work in the classroom and orient themselves towards a future they believe they can achieve. In a recent classroom setting with first-grade students, groups explored the different Holland RIASEC theme codes by taking on various roles in a flower shop simulation during which students learn about the Enterprising theme code and its relationship to Entrepreneurship. They also learned about other interest theme codes by building robots, designing websites and collaborating with other students on a variety of creative projects.
What does every parent want? Happy kids, with healthy relationships, on a path to gainful employment. The announcement included the launch of a two-generation strategy to engage parents in the career development of their children.
The Myers-Briggs Company and Cajon Valley USD are developing a Career Development Playbook and accompanying online interactive experience on the VitaNavis platform to allow parents and students to gain a deeper understanding of themselves, each other, and their vocational interests with the goal of charting a course for lifelong development. These new tools will build upon psychometrically valid data and insights from The Myers-Briggs Company and will help facilitate more insightful conversations and mutual understanding between parents and their children, the students that will become the workforce of tomorrow.
Read the full press release here.