Career Exploration with Pathway

by admin

This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: Career Exploration with Pathway.

Career Exploration with Pathway

Career Exploration with Pathway

It gets so exciting learning about a new, solid resource for your homeschool, doesn’t it? And we just discovered Pathway by Folderwave! If you are wondering what on Earth Folderwave is, read on to learn more about it from Ann McClure and Pamela Brennan, the experts on how it can help with career exploration for students.

About Anne McClure and Pamela Brennan

Ann McClure

Anne is a homeschool mom of 5, starting with a high schooler at 15, all the way down to a toddler at 2. She began homeschooling when her now-15 year old was starting kindergarten. 

Anne has a background in education, previously being a teacher in all different kinds of settings. This background helped instigate her thoughts on what to do next after her firstborn graduates from homeschool high school. 

Therefore, she started her research journey to learn more about what to do in high school and how to prepare her son for college and a career and beyond. This pivotal moment is when Folderwave came into the picture.

Pamela Brennan

Pamela has a background of 20 years in college admissions, counseling, recruiting, and mostly in operations management. She was a Director of Operations at a selective university in Boston and worked very closely with high school counselors, parents, homeschool parents, and the students (the applicants).

As she was working at the university, she was also working with Folderwave to improve their business process for application processing. But, after 20 years at the university, Pamela wanted a change. She could see the direction that Folderwave was headed and wanted to be a part of their evolution, so she began to work with them full-time and left the university. And now, she’s going on 10 years with Folderwave.

How Anne and Pamela Connected

When Anne was on a parent panel at a homeschooling conference, the moderator of the panel happened to introduce Anne to the president of Folderwave, Bob. He was seeking some feedback from a homeschool parent perspective about the market itself. 

After discussing different ideas together, they decided to start running focus groups and start developing additional content that would be a bit more geared towards the homeschool market. 

About Pathway by Folderwave

Folderwave is an evolving company. They went from college admissions to the high school space and then into the career and college counseling space. To Anne and Pamela, Folderwave is all about exploration and getting the kids to explore at an earlier age instead of waiting to the last minute when they’re about to graduate high school.

Pathway is a product by Folderwave, and it is a college and career exploration tool meant for students to begin using it as young as 12 years old or 6th grade. Students can access Pathway online and use their tools to discover more about their interests.

And it’s all about self-discovery 

They have assessment personality tests to help get kids to start thinking about things new to them and peak their interest levels. Then, it ties that interest to different possibilities for careers out there. It’s a nonabrasive approach for kids to discover new interests. 

Kids can save activities of interest throughout their time with it. They can reflect on their interests or activities with journaling or even with a reflections piece just to see how much they have changed or their growth over the years.

Investigate Your Future With Career Planning

Pathway has a state of the art, up to date, up to the minute program called Investigate Your Future With Career Planning that helps analyze certain aspects of jobs they might be interested in, job markets, future trends, and so many more amazing investigative tools kids can use to research more about their interests. 

Resume Builder

Pathway recently updated its resume builder for students to use for all sorts of scenarios, such as for college applications or even for applying for jobs while going to school. The resume builder walks students through each section to help the student make the most of their details.

Everything In One Digital Location

One of the exciting things parents within the focus groups pointed out was that they were so happy to see everything within Pathway was all in one place. 

Searching for what to do pre- and post-high school can be overwhelming since tons of research has to be done on top of the work you’re already doing. And so to have all those up-to-date tools all in one digital location in such a timely fashion is exactly what’s getting everyone thrilled about this product. 

How Pathway Can Help You

As we all know, there aren’t many resources available for career exploration for students. There are books, but nothing like Pathway, where everything you need is all in one spot.

Pathway has college counselors and digital portfolios for students to use in their career exploration. It can also be used to:

  •  Collect data and save it for future referencing
  • Be a course planner
  • Do life skills activities
  • Help create a resume. 
  • How-to guide
  • And more!

Some of their favorite tools within Pathway are the ones that show the stepping stones a child can take to a specific career. 

One such tool helps students how to get to a career goal. For example, if the student wants to be an attorney or a nurse, Pathway will show them some lateral careers or some stepping stone careers that you can take to get there.

Another great tool is the one that reveals the projected growth of different professions.It shows where in the world or country it is expected to have a growth or a decrease in need for those specific jobs.

There is such a wide range of tools in Pathway that it’s practical for all kids at different stages and ages. It can help reframe the way you think about college and career planning while educating you at the same time. 

How To Connect

Interested In Trying Pathway?

Anne and Pamela’s short term goal is to have a small group of homeschool parents who want to dig into Pathway and then give back constructive feedback to help further develop it, like beta testers.

If you are interested in learning more about Pathway, Anne and Pamela would love to connect with you. Simply email them, letting them know you would love to play around with it. 

For more information on Career Exploration check out these Homeschool Highschool Podcast episodes:

Thanks to Richie Soares with Homeschool and Humor for transcribing this episode.

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The post Career Exploration with Pathway appeared first on Ultimate Homeschool Podcast Network.

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