PRACTICE BRIEF
Laying the Groundwork for Effective Career Exploration: What Schools, Systems, and Partners Need in Place
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High-quality career exploration depends on conditions that are often missing or uneven across schools and communities, including time, staffing, educator preparation, employer and community partnerships, coordination across grades and settings, and systems for measuring quality and outcomes. Drawing on field engagement with practitioners, researchers, and state and district leaders, this brief examines how those conditions shape young people’s experiences. It identifies where schools, systems, funders, and partners should focus to make career exploration more coherent, equitable, and sustainable.
Supported by the Walton Family Foundation and Britebound, this publication is part of a broader set of resources on career exploration in middle and high school, including What Works in Career Exploration and Making Career Exploration Count. Together, these resources synthesize current evidence, define the core components of high-quality exploration, examine the conditions that shape implementation, and identify priorities for practice, policy, measurement, and future research.