Connecting Career Awareness to the Next Step

By Matthew Chaussee, CEO & Co-Founder, CareerViewXR by Be More Colorful

Career awareness is a powerful tool that can go far beyond simply showing someone a job. When applied in the right contexts and through the right partners, it helps students understand how careers connect to education, training, apprenticeships, employers and opportunities in their own communities. That was the message I brought to Washington, D.C., when CareerViewXR was selected as just one of a handful of exhibitors at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Tech Expo held on July 22.

To help align this message to real instructional use, we invited Lorie Campbell, Education Specialist from Wilson Education Service Center, to join our booth. Lorie spoke firsthand about how her organization is using CareerViewXR across dozens of schools, which naturally shifted the conversation from what the technology looks like to what effective implementation can actually accomplish. Lorie and I shared about how schools and workforce stakeholders are using immersive experiences to introduce careers, helping educators connect those experiences to local pathways, and how career awareness experiences are becoming increasingly aligned with classroom activities to meet educational standards. Most of the conversations were not really about VR, but more focused on how these technologies can strengthen the connections among the people and organizations who are already tasked with the important responsibility of helping students and career seekers figure out what comes next.

The Expo reinforced a recurring theme: while technology can help make careers visible and easier to understand, the real magic happens when tech creates new opportunities for education and workforce partners to align around the needs of individual students,  helping them develop the awareness and understanding they need to confidently take the next step.