My World of Work: New ‘pathways’ feature support the search for jobs
There are now more ways for young people to browse pathways and explore potential qualifications routes on Skills Development Scotland’s career information and advice web service, My World of Work. Senior Service Development Executive Mairi Rule explains how these changes will help young people, and those who support them:
“Our new ‘pathways’ feature is changing the way our users can search for, filter and explore job profiles. The idea behind them was simple. We grouped all the jobs on the web service into one of six broad pathway groupings based on common high level activities and skills. We then gave individuals the ability to browse job profiles, and further refine search results, by one of these six pathways.
The six pathway verbs and their descriptors are:
- Care educating and caring for others
- Create creating things and expressing new ideas
- Discover exploring problems to find answers
- Produce making and fixing things
- Protect defending people’s rights and keeping them safe
- Support supporting customers and organising things
These simple groupings provide young people with a new way of exploring jobs that challenge traditional industry stereotypes.
For example, the ‘Create’ pathway shows customers that jobs that involve creative activities can exist in a range of industry areas, such as engineering or information and computing technology. It’s a great way of showing the range of jobs that could be of interest, broadening horizons and allowing exploration of a wider range of opportunities. You’ll find the new filters within the My Career Options landing page of My World of Work and within the subject choices tool.
Similar thinking also sits behind our work on qualification routes. We know that young people in schools, particularly those focusing on passing exams, can find it difficult to understand how the subjects they are studying relate to future careers.
In addition, some young people, parents, carers and employers can be unfamiliar with the current range of available qualifications, and how all of them relate to the world of work. By introducing new qualifications functionality, we hope to help increase that understanding of the relationship between learning in the classroom and the world of work, as well as highlighting the range of learning opportunities available.
The functionality is above the ‘Getting in’ section of 150 job profiles on My World of Work, allowing users to create personalised qualification routes.
Users can view and select from different types of qualifications, including new work based learning options such as Foundation Apprenticeships, in order to build up multiple routes for one or more careers. They will also be able to view detailed information about the qualifications that are shown, such as length of study, and select links to related course and apprenticeship information.
At the end of the tool, users can view and print off the routes they’ve created which they can then compare or discuss with their SDS careers adviser, parent, carer or teacher. If signed in, customers can also save their qualification pathway to the book marks section of their My World of Work account.
We’re continuing to add qualification routes to job profiles, all of which will have the tool by the summer.”
The six new pathways on My Career Options landing page and the Subject Choices tool
To see an example of qualification routes check out https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk/my-career-options/accounting-technician
