Curriculum Documents

These career development courses have been designed to connect school learning with workplace and labour market realities, which will contribute to increasing student retention and graduation rates in Manitoba. The courses will assist students in making a realistic assessment of the many opportunities available upon graduation and how to prepare for them. The Grade 9 and 10 courses are available for implementation in September 2007.  It is anticipated that these new courses will replace the School-Initiated Career Development courses (SICs) effective in September 2007.  It is recommended that the Grade 9 and Grade 10 courses be offered in sequence, however, they can be offered independently, i.e. only Grade 9 or Grade 10.

The Blueprint for Life/Work Designs

To complement this idea of career development as life/work designs, Manitoba Education has adopted the Blueprint for Life/Work Designs as the provincial framework of learning outcomes for Career Development, Kindergarten to Grade 12.

The life/work skills identified in the Blueprint are the result of many years of developing, piloting, revising and implementing this new life/work skills framework and include 11 core skills or competencies, sorted into three areas:

• Personal Management
• Learning and Work Exploration
• Life/Work Building

The Blueprint is more than a matrix of competencies students should master to become healthy, self-reliant citizens able to effectively cope with the many work and other transitions they will encounter in their lives. It is, in fact, a 550-page publications that offers:

• A strategy for initiating or improving a career development program in a school. The process begins with needs analysis, encourages flexibility, builds on existing program strengths, stimulates coordination with other partners, supports methods for involving all stakeholders, and promotes evaluation as an essential element in ongoing refinement of career development programs.
• Summaries of exemplary programs and best practices.
• Samples of needs assessment and other forms for all levels - the forms can be readily modified and adapted to local circumstances and conditions.
• Examples of and crosswalks to other approaches to defining and describing competencies, including Human Resources Development Canada's Essential Skills Profile and the Conference Board of Canada's Employability Skills Profile.
• Listing of sample career development resources organized by Blueprint levels and competencies.