Unlocking Potential: A Guide to American Student Assistance Jobs List and Career Exploration
Introduction
Most schools wait until high school to encourage students to think about their futures, but a recent article published by the Association of Middle Level Educators (AMLE) argues that the ideal time is actually middle school, a window of opportunity that many schools miss. American Student Assistance (ASA) and other organizations recognize the importance of early career exploration and are working to provide resources and opportunities for students to discover their passions and chart a path toward their future.
The Middle School Advantage
In middle school, students are more open to exploring new things and are less influenced by their peers. They are also less likely to experience the pressure of college admissions and intense academic strain that high school students often face. By providing opportunities for career exploration without the heavy burden of expectation, we can help students determine not just what jobs they might want in the future, but who they are. What makes their eyes light up? What are they curious to try? What can they talk about for hours?
Research supports this idea. According to a 2022 report from American Student Assistance, 85 percent of middle schoolers are already thinking about future careers, and 87 percent are interested in ways to match their skills and interests to potential careers. A 2024 study found that adolescents are naturally wired for big-picture thinking, seeking connections between their learning and broader questions of purpose, future goals, and cultural implications. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the lead researcher, suggests that this finding has important implications for the design of middle and high schools, emphasizing the need to create learning experiences that honor even younger students’ developmental readiness for deep, future-oriented questions about their place in the world.
Activities to Spark Career Exploration
Here are several activities that can help middle schoolers think more expansively about their futures, prompting them to question initial assumptions about what careers might fit their emerging interests and strengths, while also exploring possibilities they’ve never considered.
Stir Up Ideas: Hypothetical Questions
Hypothetical questions invite students to think outside the box, creating distance between common assumptions and limitations that can hinder career exploration. Lucy Sattler, a career education professional, writes that students don’t need to factor in anything other than what they’re interested in, which can be incredibly liberating. Teachers can kick off an advisory period or writing exercise with scenarios that encourage thinking beyond the present. For example, ask students: If you could build a career around something you're secretly good at, what would it be? Or, what career would feel like getting paid to be who you already are?
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Look 'Behind the Scenes'
High school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard helps students uncover unexpected career paths by digging deeper into areas that already spark their interest. "Jobs Behind the Scenes" can be used as a group brainstorm activity or a research project. Students identify the experiences they enjoy-like visiting a theme park or going to a sports game-and name all the behind-the-scenes jobs that make it possible. For a concert, they might discover sound engineer, stage designer, merchandise manager, lighting technician, and tour planner. This helps students understand that every big experience they love is powered by a wide variety of career roles, not just the ones in the spotlight.
From Pie Charts to Purpose
Young students often limit their future thinking to areas where they currently excel, excluding fields where they could develop competence over time, notes Phyllis Fagell, a middle school counselor and author of the book Middle School Matters. She helps students break out of this by sharing stories of real-life figures who pivoted mid-career-such as Vera Wang, who went from figure skater to fashion designer-and using an engaging activity to help students put this philosophy into practice. Give students two blank pie charts, then ask them to divide the first by how they currently spend their time and the second by what they wish their time allocation looked like. Looking at your "wish" pie chart, what activities take up the most time? Are there any activities in your current chart that you excel at but don't actually like?
Meet Future Me
“A lot of the time, teenagers feel like they’re not in control,” Beachboard says, so it can be powerful to remind them of areas they can start influencing today. Her “Future Goals Gala” is a 30-year class reunion (held 30 years early). Students come dressed as the people they plan to become, complete with homemade props to prove it. Past students have brought in everything from cakes they made as aspiring Michelin chefs to their cure for cancer in a vial.
Before the event, students complete a guiding worksheet with questions like: What places do you really hope to visit? What kind of impact do you hope to have in your community in your field of study? As Beachboard meets each student’s “future self,” she notes students with overlapping interests who might work well together and small passions she can weave into upcoming lessons. “For a teacher who says, ‘This seems like a lot of extra work,’ it is, but it’s worth it,” she says. “This shows that you are invested not just in the student for their education, but in the person they’re going to become.”
Start With Strengths
Instead of starting with the potentially intimidating question “What do you want to be?”, this station rotation activity asks students to examine what they’re already capable of. Each station represents a different strength-from creative thinking and problem solving to leadership. Students complete quick challenges at each station by drawing a task card with scenarios like: You need to organize a school-wide event, or You have to solve a disagreement between two friends. Students then match the scenario to one of their identified strengths and explain how they would use that strength to respond to the challenge.
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After completing the station rotation, they can reflect on their top strengths and use a career-matching tool like My Next Move to explore jobs that align with their skills.
Turn Preferences Into Career Clues
A simple game of “Would you rather…” can help orient students a little more clearly toward what they might see themselves doing in the future. Beachboard asks all of her students to stand up and move to either side of the classroom based on their response to prompt cards. After the full set of 30 questions, they fill out a Google Form version of the activity and Beachboard uses AI to generate a personalized list of 20 careers that match their preferences. From there, they choose a few careers to research more deeply, writing or presenting a ‘Day in the Life’ reflection about what someone in that field actually does. It’s simple, scalable, and never fails to spark meaningful conversation.
Educational consultant Toby Fischer takes a slightly different approach to help students envision their future selves. After listing five personal traits or goals-for example, “I love animals” or “I’m a great team player”-students feed them into an AI tool of their choosing with this prompt: “Based on the following traits, write a creative and funny prediction of who I will be in 10 years. Include my job, where I live, what a typical day looks like, and something surprising about my future self.”
Visit the Office (Virtually)
Virtual field trips allow students a chance to experience a day in the life of careers they’re interested in. After researching salary, education prerequisites, and demands for various medical professions, teacher Brandi Burger’s anatomy and physiology students observed a knee-replacement surgery in real-time via video call and asked questions as the doctors performed the surgery. For some, it was a reminder that real-life medicine is less bloody and more intricate than the dramatized television versions.
At the middle school level, this idea can be replicated with more age-appropriate virtual visits. For example, students could observe animal examinations at a veterinary clinic, routine cleanings at a dental office, or diagnostic procedures at an auto repair shop.
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Hear From The Pros
Instead of simply reading about a career, career and technical education teacher Nancy Kuhn sends students straight to the source. Each year, her eighth graders conduct personal interviews with a professional in a field of interest-from architects to electrical engineers. Rather than giving out a set list of questions, task students with researching their interview subject and chosen field in order to create their own. After the interviews, students can present what they’ve learned to their classmates with a slide deck or short video. To ensure variety, consider requiring that no two students choose the same career.
Resources for Career Readiness
Several organizations, including American Student Assistance (ASA), Canva Education, and AMLE, are partnering to provide resources for career readiness. These resources include activities that help students explore their identity, values, top career choices, personal and professional networks, and skill building.
- Explore your identity: The "identity circle" activity helps students figure out some of the different aspects of themselves that make them who they are, exploring how certain parts of one’s identity, like gender, culture, and interests, all come together as important aspects of who we are.
- Explore your values: This activity helps students explore their values by thinking first about what values have been instilled in them, and then thinking about how those can guide them in determining their own priorities.
- Explore top career choices: This activity encourages students to explore potential careers all around them, examining career clusters, salaries, education levels, and job details to better understand what’s involved.
- Explore personal and professional networks: This activity helps students identify people in their lives who can provide advice, answer questions, boost their confidence, and help them learn.
- Explore skill building: This activity encourages students to evaluate their current skills and identify where they’d like to learn more.
The ASA Approach: Find Your Why
ASA inspires learners to explore their passions, experiment with potential careers, and confidently chart a path toward their future, whether or not that path includes a traditional college degree. At the center of ASA's work is a simple but powerful message: Find your why. ASA believes every young person deserves the opportunity to discover the intersection between what they love, what they’re good at, what the world needs, and what they can be paid for. Through free digital tools, philanthropy, research, impact investing, and advocacy, ASA works alongside students, educators, families, employers, mission-aligned nonprofits and businesses, and community partners to expand access to career readiness resources and economic opportunity.
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