MCAE Conference
November 4, 2010
Career Pathways Road Mapquest:
Integrating Career Awareness and
Next Steps into the ESOL Curriculum
Presenters:
Lisa Beatman
Russell Fenton
Director
ESOL Morning Coordinator
Jamaica Plain Community Centers Adult Learning Program
Career Pathways: Overview
There are several driving forces behind the pairing of Career
Pathways with ABE:
 Economic reality

The need for a highly skilled workforce.
 Adult Learner needs

Adults want to learn the skills necessary to find and
keep a good job.
 Maximum impact

One of the most important, if not the most important,
ways that ABE programs best serve our students is by
providing services that result in the most sustained
economic outcomes for them and their families.
Mapping it all out:
Like many ABE programs,
ALP had already been offering various job readiness services.
 The Career Pathways project spurred us to “recalibrate”, i.e. take a
fresh look at the standalone activities and focus more on organizing
them and their outcomes. We are now planning to help students
build a portfolio or body of work that demonstrates increasing
marketable skills, as they advance academically through our levels.
 We “zoomed out” to look at evolving street-level, city-level, and
regional labor market realities.
 We “zoomed in” to look at the evolving job outlook for our current
students. For example, Jane S., during our GED new student
orientation this year, described how, after 20 years working in a
union factory, this past January the company was bought by a
Chinese firm who immediately laid off all the American staff. In the
past, someone like Jane with a good work record could have found
comparable work without a high school diploma. Today, she needs
much more horsepower: not only the GED, but a higher level of
skill-building, credentials, and contemporary job hunting skills
involving computer proficiency.
JPCC Adult Learning Program:
Integrating Career Pathways
The ALP used CP grant funding to do the following:
 Design a student survey on short and long-term career goals to
be administered 2 to 3 times a year.
 Develop and deepen partnerships such as JobNet and the
Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation.
 Create a career pathways curriculum.
 Design career-building benchmarks.
 Develop and implement lesson plan for each class level on
academic, career building, and other self-efficacy skills.
 Determine how Distance Learning and Computer Lab activities
can increase intensity of skill-building.
 Plan quarterly field trips to community colleges, etc.; plan a
guest speaker series on career ladders.
 Develop student evaluation tools.
Student Surveys: Vital Feedback
 When asked how the ALP could better help
students meet their goals, over 50% said we
could help them find employment or improve
their current employment situation.
 While a small group of students had a clear
idea of what career path they wanted —
nursing — a majority of students were unsure
about their career path.
 This feedback illustrates the need and the
potential for developing an individualized
Career Pathways Roadmap for each student.
Roadmap under construction:

We are still developing this tool. We
will be giving a binder to all new
and continuing students. This binder
will include a flexible checklist with
“pit stops”. As students gain
career readiness skills via
contextualized curriculum, career
counseling, targeted workshops, field
trips, etc., their accomplishments will
be checked off on the list.
 Documentation, including copies of resumes they have
written, college essays, etc. will be added to the binder,
turning it into a useful portfolio and confidence-builder.
VIP:
Very Important Partnerships
 Community partnerships extend our reach,
enabling ALP to provide more career
pathways services than our funding permits,
and bringing additional talent, expertise, and
resources to help our students with their next
steps.
VIP Partner: JPNDC
 Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development
Corporation, Jobs for JP Program
 The ALP refers students to JPNDC and
receives referrals in return.
 JPNDC provides job placement skills and
development including job searching, resume
writing, interview practice, and more.
 We invited Karla Torrez, Director of Jobs for
JP, to be a keynote speaker at our July 2010
graduation. She told students “if you don’t
have a dream, you’ll never reach for it.”
VIP Partner: JobNet
 The ALP will host a Career Fair in the spring in
partnership with JobNet and invite employers
and training providers geared towards
recruiting employees from the adult education
population and other community residents.
 JobNet and NDC will provide onsite “How to…”
workshops to ALP students, including: How to
work a job fair, How to complete online
applications”, How to network, etc.
Community Career Fair 2010
VIP Partner:
Wainwright Bank
 The Jamaica Plain branch of Wainwright
Bank is generously lending their community
conference room free of charge for an
ongoing ALP ESOL morning class.
 A Wainwright representative presented a two-
part workshop to a morning level 3 class:

Career paths in banking, finance

Financial literacy
Banking on your Community
Wainwright Bank Manager Tom opens the financial literacy workshop
VIP Partner:
Bunker Hill Community College
 ALP refers many higher-level students to
BHCC for placement into their certificate and
degree training programs, including culinary
arts, HVAC technician, graphic arts design,
LPN, and more.
 Both lower level and higher level classes visit
Bunker Hill for awareness raising and
information gathering – it’s never too early to
start.
ALP students get a tour of BHCC
by admissions office staff
Career Pathways In Action:
One milestone at time

Milan Kumar-Karki
Milan’s Journey
 Milan Kumar-Karki was a level 3 ESOL ALP student
with some graphic design experience from his native
country of Nepal.
 When the CP grant was awarded, we asked Milan to
do an internship with the ALP in order to gain
experience in graphic design in the United States
while at the same time helping us launch our program.
 With coaching from his teacher, Milan designed the
Career Pathways Road MapQuest graphic that is used
for all students in our program.
 After graduating from his English class, Milan enrolled
in a graphic design school to get more specialized
training.
Milan’s
Project
Lessons Learned
 Lessons learned

Given some guidance, a motivated student
took on an opportunity to utilize and further
develop his marketable skills; an opportunity
catalyzed by the focus on Career Pathways
development.
Career Pathways: The Potholes
 Not all students are as motivated as Milan nor as
clear in their vision.
 Barriers:
 Personal barriers prevent growth: the need for
childcare, public transportation, decent wardrobe
for interviews, and inflexible job schedules.
 Academic barriers prevent growth: lack of testtaking and note-taking skills; unfamiliarity with
academic vocabulary.
 Financial barriers prevent growth: insufficient
funds to go to college or enter job training
programs.
Possible Solutions
 Build Career awareness from the earliest levels of the
program.
 Integrate career pathways curriculum across the levels.
 Emphasize learning English for academic or career
development purposes.
 Focus program-wide on next steps:
 For ESOL programs, the next step may be GED,
community college or job training programs
 Classes should be designed with these specific
goals in mind
 Provide complementary support services, including
financial aid, budgeting, college advising, etc.
Career Pathways Resources
 With the CP grant money, the ALP has invested in
the following resources to address some of the
challenges mentioned:
 Overcoming Barriers to Success—a video and
workbook series addressing many of the personal
and financial barriers that prevent adults from
moving forward. This series has been introduced to
higher level students.
 Industry-Specific Role-Play English—These role-play
guides address scenarios and vocabulary specific to
the Banking, Health, and Restaurant industry.
 A Language-free Career Assessment Tool—this
video is completely language free and is well-suited
to get lower-level students thinking about career
options.
Test-driving resources for
road-worthiness:
 Foundations: Let’s start at
the very beginning.
 ALP ESOL Level One
Teacher Nathan Eckstrom
scaffolds career awareness
and readiness into a class
for beginners.
Paving the way for advanced
students: an entrepreneurial path
ESOL Level 5 Teacher Charissa Ahlstrom taught a unit on
Starting your own Business:
 Many students in their goal surveys in the beginning of the year
identified “Starting your own business” as an area of interest, and when
asked, the class voted on that topic as one of the themes to cover.
Some had owned businesses in their country, or their families had, and
they wished to establish a business here as well.
 In small groups, students brainstormed what you need to do and find
out to start one’s own business.
 All students read “A checklist for starting a small business” from the
Boston Globe business section , and a brochure from the Center for
Women and Enterprise.
 Alison Moronta, the Business Development Director at JPNDC, came
and did an onsite presentation to the class.
Next Steps for Students
 Gain awareness of the career options
available to them.
 Gain more responsibility for their own
success.
 Gain more resilience when faced with
setbacks.
 Develop into role models for peers and
children.
Next Steps for the ALP
 Seek more resources in order provide more career
development of students, link, modify, and redeploy
existing programs such as computer classes and
distance learning towards this purpose.
 Provide students with credible next steps to shoot for
depending on their situation:

Community college

Job training programs

GED completion
 Hold students accountable to their path, with the
understanding that there will be multiple revisions or
“pit stops” along the way.
Brought to you by: Career Pathways is a work-in-progress, thanks to:


Funding by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education,
Adult and Community Learning Services.
The ALP Road Crew:
Director:
Academic Coordinators: Nathan Eckstrom
Russell Fenton
Distance Learning Coordinators: Diana Satin
Michael Feher
Linda Hamilton-Korey
ESOL Teachers:
Literacy:
Level 1:
Level 2:
Level 3:
Level 4:
Level 5:
Lisa Beatman
ASE Teachers:
Pre-GED 1:
Pre-GED 2:
GED:
Russell Fenton
Nathan Eckstrom
Amy Murrett
Linda Hamilton-Korey
Russell Fenton
Computer Teachers:
Marianna Geraskina
Charissa Ahlstrom
Support Services:
Educational Counselor/Support Svcs. Coordinator:
Volunteer Coordinator:
ESOL Assessment/Data Coordinator:
Office Assistants:
Technology Coordinator:
Roger Oser
David Stearns
Michael Feher
David Stearns
Linda Hamilton-Korey
Franklin Peralta
Susan Chernilo-Cohen
Linda Hamilton-Korey
Ingrid & Sandra Pedraza
Alex Sviridenko