Career Exploration Activity

Before students can think seriously about earned income, taxes, or take-home pay, they need a career in mind to run the numbers against. This career exploration activity gives them one — or three, actually — using data they didn't have to make up and a source they can go back to on their own.

The setup is simple. Students log onto the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Exploring Career Information" site, a free public tool built for exactly this purpose, and research three different jobs of their choosing. For each one, they work through the same set of questions: what category the job falls under, what it actually involves day to day, the median salary, whether it requires a college degree, and what the industry's growth outlook looks like. Then they weigh advantages against disadvantages, using the numbers they just found instead of a gut feeling.

That last step is what makes this more than a research scavenger hunt. A student who says "I want to be a game designer" has a preference. A student who can point to a median salary, a degree requirement, and a growth number and still say "I want to be a game designer, and here's why the trade-offs are worth it" has a decision. The activity is built to walk students from one to the other three separate times, so patterns start to show up on their own — which fields pay well without a degree, which ones are growing fastest, which trade-offs repeat across very different jobs.

Because students choose their own three careers, the same worksheet works for a class full of wildly different interests without any modification. A student interested in nursing and a student interested in carpentry are doing the identical intellectual work: pull real data, weigh it, defend a conclusion.

Teachers often introduce this right after a unit on what "earned income" actually means, since a median salary is the clearest possible bridge between an abstract vocabulary word and a real number a student can picture depositing every two weeks. It also works well as an early step before a lesson on take-home pay, because students arrive at that lesson already holding three concrete salary figures instead of an unfamiliar one plucked from a textbook example.

This career exploration activity comes from Module 9: Earned Income in Rapunzl's grades 6–12 curriculum.

Comparing Different Careers

Instructions

Log onto the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Exploring Career Information” website at http://www.bls.gov/k12/. Using the table below, research and compare three different jobs.

Career #1

Career #2

Career #3

Teacher Notes

The BLS site is the whole point here, not a formality — it puts real median salary and growth-outlook figures in front of students instead of asking them to guess or rely on what a relative told them about a job once. If your lab access is limited, this also works as a take-home assignment, since the site requires nothing but a browser.

Watch for students who pick three versions of the same career to make the comparison easier. Nudge them toward genuinely different categories; the activity's value comes from noticing how a degree requirement or growth outlook can swing across fields, and that only shows up with real variety.

The "advantages" and "disadvantages" rows are where the thinking actually happens, so don't let students fill them in before finishing the data rows above. A common shortcut is writing "good pay" as an advantage without having found a salary number yet — send students back to the site rather than accepting an answer that isn't grounded in what they researched.

This activity pairs naturally with a follow-up discussion on how these same salary figures interact with taxes and take-home pay, which is where the unit heads next. If students finish early, have them repeat the exercise with one career they'd never actually consider, purely for the sake of comparing the numbers — it takes the personal stakes out of the research and lets students focus on reading the data itself.

This career exploration activity is one piece of the broader Earned Income unit inside the Rapunzl teacher portal, where activities like this one sit alongside articles, guided practice, and a classroom investing simulator built for grades 6–12.

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