WHAT IS AN Academic and Career Plan (ACP)?
“The most important thing to know is how very little we know and how much more there is to learn.” Revised from Einstein and Socrates
An Academic Career Plan (ACP) is a dynamic, working, collaboratively-created process involving creation of a document bank or product, that allows students to capture the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to achieve academic, personal/social, and career goals. WHAT????
In easier to understand language: An ACP or Academic and Career Plan is a plan developed through a collaborative process, helping you learn about yourself, your skills, your goals and more, to help you make future career plans. The process supports the creation of a product - group of documents or ‘container’ of evidence of skills and achievements that you - students- work on with the help of parents, school staff and the community of employers, that helps you understand who you are, what you like, what you are good at, what skills you want to learn, to explore careers for your future and know how to get to that type of career, if the career will still be there and available when you graduate, if the career will be a good match for you and your life goals.
Effective ACP development is a critical and creative thinking process involving activities designed to include Self-Exploration, Career Exploration, and Career Planning and Management to ensure college, career and community readiness. ACP refers to both a process that students engage in with the support of parents and school staff as well as a product they create and maintain to promote and enhance positive academic, career and personal development. The documents created and saved are to be purposeful - a thought filled collection that shows effort, progress, achievement and planning. It is a flexible and valuable tool.
3 Main ACP Components:
- KNOW -Who am I? What do I like? What do I know?
- EXPLORE - What do I want to do?
- PLAN - How do I get there?
Here’s a little more information about each component:
KNOW -Who am I? What do I like? What do I know?
- Self awareness and exploration activities
- Identifying personal strengths and skills to build
- Goal setting
- Individual short and long term goals to support each of academic, career and personal development
EXPLORE - What do I want to do?
- Career Assessment and Research
- Including investigation of career clusters, career pathways and individual career interests that match the student's interests, skills and values
- Including skills necessary for the occupation, educational preparation needed at HS and post secondary, earning potential and current and future labor market trends for the career
PLAN - how do I get there?
- Academic and Career Planning Management
- Planned coursework in middle and high school that supports the career goals and meet graduation requirements
- Exploring what coursework is needed at the postsecondary level for your career options and planning HS courses that support the post-secondary course success
- Goal setting
- 4 year course plan of study (course plan that supports certain careers)
- distance learning experiences and opportunities
- planning of dual enrollment where you can earn HS and post-secondary credit
- Work and Career Exploration Experiences like Youth Apprenticeships, Job Shadowing, guest speakers, educational tours, opportunities of study abroad and military recruiter visits
- Co-curricular experiences that are relevant
- Experience with and exposure to the knowledge, skills and habits necessary for future success in life, career and family
- What activities, athletics, clubs support my career path?
- Community Service Activities and community involvement for life
- Leadership Opportunities
How do I start?
The grade level checklists are a GUIDE for students to use in the development of the ACP. Utilize the templates provided or create your own documents using electronic presentation tools for essays, slide shows, graphs, charts and more. Take audio, video and photographs of items that can’t be stored on paper. Save documents that highlight your work in your work samples / artifacts folder.
Store your ACP work in your Google Drive folder. When you are ready to leave or graduate we’ll help you save them into your own personal files. Continuously work on these items by reviewing, updating, deleting and adding, through the support of the community / education and family resources so you will have a practical, useful tool for helping you in making decisions about your life and in helping you get on the path you
want to go.
Success - Plan for it!