STUDENT ENGAGEMENT:

Explain to students that the culmination of their unit on careers will be live, in-person interviews with professionals. These will be adults from a variety of career areas who will join the class and interview each student directly and on their own. The idea behind these interviews is to pull together all of the work that students have done with career up to this point. The interviewers will get copies of their resume. The students will be expected to present their elevator pitch and be able to share their personal stories. The students should review their career choices and skills ahead of the interviews.

 

DIGGING IN:

First, it is important for students to complete an online application. It’s very common for potential employees to be asked to complete an application before an interview happens. This may be online or on paper.

 

Just like the resume, the application is another opportunity to succeed or fail at making a positive first impression. Even though much of the information might be simple, short answers, it’s important that students consider things like spelling, capitalization and grammar as they complete their application. Failure to do this may cause their interview (and yes, the interviewers will be seeing their applications) to start with the wrong impression of them.

 

Ask the students to log onto the online application at: intoolkit.com/msapp

 

Encourage them to take their time with this application and review their answers at least once before submitting. It is also okay for students to proofread one anothers’ applications before submitting.

 

Once students have submitted their applications, it may be a good time for students to begin gathering important items together (resume, elevator pitch, personal story) for review and printing (if this has not already happened). Make sure that every student has returned a clean resume that can be given to the professional interviewers when they arrive.

 

Share the rubric that the interviewers will be using to rate student interviews and allow the remainder of this class time for students to review materials and develop a list of potential questions that they think a professional interviewer may ask. They can pose these to one another and rehearse answering.

​

INTO ACTION:

For the following two days, invite local professionals into the classroom to interview students one-on-one. Explain to these professionals that interviews should be short (approximately five minutes), but that students should be able to answer questions about their resumes, their skills, their future career plans and present a short elevator pitch.

 

Provide these professionals with copies of the rubric that they will use ahead of time for review. For the two days of interviews, professionals will need copies of each students’ resumes and enough blank rubrics to account for all students. Each professional will need a location to conduct these interviews in relative quiet. This could be in a different room, but a hallway can also suffice. Each of the two professionals will be conducting interviews independently and should be able to split and complete interviews with the full class across two days of interviews. Project Leadership staff and leadership can assist with conducting these interviews or connecting with other professionals.

 

Students who are waiting to complete their interviews can spend time rehearsing together. Those who have already completed can assist those waiting, or work on reflecting on their experiences.