Career Exploration Guide
Table of Contents
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- Using This Guide
- Powerful Whys for Middle Grades Career Exploration
- The Path Forward: Arizona’s “FutureME” Plan
- High-Quality Career Exploration and Conditions for Success
- Building Your System
- The eECAP: A Cornerstone of Exploration and Planning
- Assessing Readiness and the Readiness Index
- Measuring Impact: Start with the End in Mind
- Partnering for Success: The Role of Intermediaries & Business Partners
- Looking Ahead
- Glossary of Terms & Acronyms
- Addendum
- State Standards & Teaching Strategies for Career Exploration
- Future Me At-a-Glance: Definition and Components of High-Quality Career Exploration
- Additional Planning & Implementation Resources
- Examples of Impact
- Delivery Models
All Arizona middle-school students deserve access to high-quality, developmentally appropriate career exploration that sparks curiosity, broadens possibilities, and empowers students to discover unique future pathways to success. This guide, a publication of the Arizona Business & Education Coalition (June 2026), will support you in building and strengthening a coordinated middle grades career exploration system that centers students while respecting the realities faced by schools and partners.
Overview
The guide will help you to:
- Identify your why.
- Set goals and consider how you will measure impact.
- Assess your readiness.
- Identify gaps, needs and resources.
- Plan your next steps.
The guide can be used whether you are planning, expanding, or resetting your career exploration efforts.
The guide identifies conditions for successful implementation of high-quality career exploration. It is aligned with “FutureME,” Arizona’s 3-year plan for expanding middle school career exploration (see Section 4).
It spotlights processes, structures, and decision points for effective systemic implementation of middle grades career exploration.
The guide is a “working document” meant to be used by teams, no matter their perceived stage of readiness. The guide can be moved through sequentially, engaged with as priorities dictate, and returned to as a resource as implementation progresses.
Within each section, it provides opportunities to reflect on the local context. Built-in prompts and planning spaces invite teams to pause, assess, and make intentional choices that align with their goals and resources.
The guide does not prescribe a single model or solution. To be effective, districts and communities will need to tailor their local context, capacity, and priorities while staying grounded in the core elements that support high quality career exploration.
Download "From Vision to Practice: A Guide for Developing Middle Grades Career Exploration Systems that Work"