9.2 Career Readiness and 9.4 Life Literacies and Key Skills
Standard 9.2 Career Awareness, Exploration, Preparation and Training and Standard 9.4 Life Literacies and Key Skills concurrently support the development of lifelong skills, behaviors and dispositions identified in exemplary students, employers/employees, community members and leaders.
Standard 9.2 develops career readiness, outlining the importance of being knowledgeable about one's interests and talents, and being well informed about postsecondary and career options.
Standard 9.4 highlights key literacies and technical skills that are critical for students to develop to live and work in an interconnected global economy.
These two standards are intended to be integrated together and within other disciplines to develop critical understandings, skills and literacies for postsecondary success.
Career Awareness and Planning
Career awareness and planning is focused on preparing all students for postsecondary success. This preparation involves students gaining awareness of and exposure to a wide array of careers. The development of employability skills and self-awareness is also essential, allowing students to form a potential occupational identity and position them to make more informed educational and occupational choices.
Creativity and Innovation
Creativity includes the use of a wide range of idea-creation techniques (such as brainstorming) to generate new and worthwhile ideas (both incremental and radical concepts). Additionally, within creativity, flexibility is evident through the elaboration, refinement, analysis and evaluation of ideas in order to maximize creative efforts. Originality and inventiveness in work may also be evident while understanding the real-world limits to adopting new ideas. Failure is viewed as an opportunity to learn and adapt as well as understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes.
Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving
The ability to solve problems effectively begins with gathering data, seeking resources, and applying critical thinking skills. An essential aspect of problem solving is being able to reflect on why possible solutions for solving problems were or were not s