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Abstract
This paper describes a classroom exercise related to career development that helps students explore career paths found in their major. While we primarily focus on the Human Resource Management (HRM) major, we provide guidance for adapting the exercise to different majors as well as first year business students. First, we summarize career development literature focusing on college students. We next provide background for the development of the exercise. Our major is required to assess the curriculum as part of university-wide curricular assessment, and we will describe how this exercise grew out of that assessment. We then describe the exercise and the positive outcomes for students. In the Appendices to this paper we provide: a template illustrating how our curriculum builds across years which can be adapted to help orient students in the context of their major, complete directions for the HRM version of the exercise, and instructor teaching notes which include suggestions on how this exercise can be adapted for other majors within business schools. The exercise supports our students' concerns and university's interest in assessment and assists students as they make the transition from student life to their professional careers.
Keywords: career exploration, career planning, focus group
Career planning is important because individuals generally do not spend their careers with one employer. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median number of years that wage and salary workers have been with their current employer was 4.2 years in January 2018, and 4.1 years in January 2020 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). This means that if a typical employee works 45 years, they will have changed employers ten or more times in their career. Instead of a company career, where an employee rises through the ranks of one company, increasingly an employee has an individual career, where the employee advances in the profession, changing organizations many times. As careers become more person-specific than organization-specific, it is important that employees engage in career planning for themselves, rather than wait for the organization to plan their career for them. For example, Baker (2002) used the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery "Career Exploration Program" with a nationally representative samples of high school students and found that participation in the program increased career exploration knowledge and...