Page 31 - Guidance Education 11-12 (2006)

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THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 11 AND 12: GUIDANCE AND CAREER EDUCATION
Exploration of Opportunities
Overall Expectations
By the end of this course, students will:
• use research skills and strategies to gather and interpret relevant information about work and learning opportunities;
• analyseemergingsocialandeconomictrendsandtheirimpactonindividuals,workplaces, and career opportunities;
• describe,onthebasisofresearch,opportunitiesinvariousoccupationalsectorsandexplain the requirements and challenges of selected occupations;
• demonstrateanunderstandingoftypesofworkplaces,theirrelatedworkplaceissues,and legislation governing the workplace.
Specific Expectations
Accessing and Managing Information
By the end of this course, students will:
– identify the specific types of information they need in order to make effective decisions about work and learning opportunities;
– identify, through research, various sources (e.g., print, electronic, human) of career- related information and assess these sources on the basis of identified criteria (e.g., bias, authority, accuracy, usefulness, personal relevance);
– acquire information about fields of work and the nature of the workplace through experiential learning opportunities (e.g., information interviews, job twinning, job shadowing, work experience);
– demonstrate the ability to communicate effectively (e.g., using appropriate vocabu- lary, telephone protocol, and letter format) to gather career-related information;
– demonstrate the ability to obtain and interpret career-related information from labour-market statistics, charts, graphs, and tables.
Trends
By the end of this course, students will:
– identify and explain the impact of eco- nomic and societal trends (e.g., globaliza- tion, outsourcing, new technologies, envi- ronmental concerns) on the work life of women and men in Canada (e.g., reduced job security, increased prevalence of part- time and contract work, more frequent career changes);
– identify fields of work, jobs, and self- employment and entrepreneurship oppor- tunities – in local, regional, national, and international contexts – that are growing as a result of identified trends;
– describe employment-related trends (e.g., the relationship between education levels and earnings or employment rates), using statistical information, such as labour- market analyses, occupational outlook projections, and census data.