As educators, we know that the decisions youth make today—from elective courses to extracurricular activities—can inform and shape their future pathways. Research shows that youth begin to form attitudes about careers as early as elementary school—attitudes that are predictive of the careers they eventually pursue. This means the time for impactful, meaningful career exploration is now.
YES Career Explorations are intentionally designed to address this need. They provide a critical mechanism for introducing youth to a broad spectrum of career options and helping them envision the possibilities ahead.
What We Learned from Stakeholders
To develop career resources that truly meet today’s needs, the YES team at the Museum of Science engaged with educators, school administrators, industry professionals, and youth via surveys, interviews, focus groups, and classroom testing. Their insights were fundamental to shaping our approach. Here is what we heard:
• Educators stressed the importance of integrating career exploration with existing curricula because of limited instructional time. They noted that affordable, easy-to-implement resources are scarce. At the same time, too many resources can feel overwhelming—feedback that inspired us to create a curated set of career materials.
• Employers emphasized that for today's dynamic and evolving landscape of work, youth need strong durable skills (sometimes referred to as "soft skills" or “21st century skills”) such as collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and perseverance.
• Youth voiced a desire for more choice and agency in their exploration. They want clear connections between what they do in the classroom and real-world careers, and they do not want to be "pigeonholed" into exploring a particular job. They need to see how their interests and skills connect to future possibilities. Youth also prefer a hands-on approach to career exploration over passive “sit and get” activities.
From our research, we recognized the need to broaden perspectives about how youth think about STEM careers. Increasingly, employers view science, technology, engineering, and math not as job titles but as mindsets—a way of approaching challenges across many fields. Similarly, supporting families in parallel is equally important as families are one of youth’s biggest influences when considering careers.
How YES Career Explorations Respond to These Needs
The YES team at the Museum of Science has a proven record of developing engaging, hands-on STEM curricula that help youth build STEM knowledge, grapple with open-ended problems, and develop durable skills. By using an engineering design process that encourages evidence-based reasoning, ideation, evaluation and improvement, all youth develop competencies that transcend any single discipline or career path.
Responding to stakeholder needs, YES Career Exploration activities integrate with YES Enrichment units. This combination helps youth connect their engineering experiences to real-world career opportunities-- broadening their understanding of how STEM skills apply in diverse professions.
YES Career Explorations empower youth choice and agency.
• We use the National Career Clusters® Framework to expose youth to careers across multiple clusters, showing them that professionals from many sectors work together to solve complex societal problems.
• Youth engage through short videos, interactive decision-making activities, and a career quiz designed to support open-ended exploration rather than prescribe specific paths.
• A Day in the Life stories present realistic professional scenarios and choices, helping youth see how real-world decisions lead to different outcomes.
Through curated, choice-based, and integrated resources, youth connect their skills, knowledge, and interests to future possibilities.
YES Career Explorations are designed to be flexible based on classroom time available. Activities can be completed in one class period or extended over two or three. Resources include a letter to families with suggestions on how they can continue to support youth’s career exploration at home and in the community.
YES has always believed that every learner deserves access to meaningful STEM experiences. In keeping with this commitment, YES Career Explorations are free to download from our website: https://yes.mos.org/yes-careers/.
A special thanks to the youth, educators, administrators, and industry professionals who contributed their insights throughout this process. Your collaboration helps us create richer, more relevant learning experiences for all youth.
This work was generously supported by National Grid.
