Thinking Ahead…

For the past few weeks, we’ve been focusing on something a little different in Maker: Career Life Education – or CLE for short. As it’s name entails, this short unit is cantered around learning about future career and life opportunities. To do this however, we first need to learn more about ourselves, in order to understand where we want to go in life. So, our class was introduced to MyBlueprint, a very helpful and streamlined website that helps students manage and plan their high school, post-secondary, and occupational careers. Personally, I had first signed up and used MyBlueprint a couple months ago, right after Mr. McLeod came in to our class to discuss next year’s course selection. I fell in love with it right away, it takes away everything I was worried about and scared of in terms of planning my future. So I was super happy that we were beginning to use it as part of our CLE course.

Included in the list of assignments we were tasked with were filling out various Who Am I surveys, completing our graduation plan, and finding potential apprenticeship, university, and workplace opportunities. 

Completing the Who Am I surveys was really easy. There are 5 different surveys; Learning Styles, Personality, Interests, Knowledge, and Motivations. Almost all the questions are multiple choice, so all I had to do was click an answer and after I completed all the questions in that survey, the algorithm would put me in to a certain category and explain why. This is really cool, because for the most part, I felt like they were quite accurate. These surveys helped me to get a stronger idea of how I think and how my mind operates. 

The Graduation Plan feature is another really cool feature that can help you map out your high school career to set yourself up for the future. It’s an easy-to-use interface where each grade and its course slots are mapped out for you to insert your desired courses in to. There are a few things that could do with being changed such as the fact some courses are missing, but overall this put things in to perspective for me and being able to see a visual depiction of all of my high school courses was something new. It’s nice to think about the future once in a while but honestly I’m still not even sure what courses I’m taking in grade 12, so it was a bit difficult to choose.

In my opinion, one of the best features MyBlueprint offers is the post secondary planning aspect where they suggest certain apprenticeships, university programs, workplaces and occupations. The data from the Who Am I surveys is taken and broken down to individually pick the most suitable future career opportunities. It’s neat to get a logistical career recommendation because most of the time I am given a recommendation it’d through talking to someone who’s ideas and opinions may come in to affect. When looking deeper in to each suggested career path, there is a section where it will tell you if you are a good match or not. As much as this is all really cool, I kept telling myself that the only way I can really know what I want to do is by thinking about it personally, not having a website choose for me.

That brings me to my last point. As the main project of this unit, we each created a Keynote presentation that answered a few questions regarding the self-learning we had undergone through MyBlueprint…

How does knowing yourself better affect your career choices and opportunities?

How does developing your self-awareness help you to make life and career choices?

How can you develop your skillset for continuous improvement and lifelong learning?

Our job was to take what he had learned by using MyBlueprint and discuss how it will affect the way we think and plan for the future. 

I had a great time this whole project because the main principles and key ideas we were focusing on, I had already been thinking about in my spare time. I think it’s good that we are beginning to think about the future because there are certainly times where I take a step back and realize I have now part the half way mark in my high school career and I will be applying for university before I know it. This unit has helped me filter through all my thoughts and ideas to better understand myself, and I’m looking forward to my future.