Virtual Career Fair For The Win

Even though our virtual career fair was birthed during the pandemic, in my opinion, the overall concept remains relevant in a post-pandemic world. Today, I will talk about how my counseling co-worker and I started with Career Cafe and how we turned it into a virtual career fair model.

During my 18 years as a school counselor, I always heard about other counselors hosting career fairs at their schools. The fairs would usually be held in the gym or multi-purpose room. Several professionals of various career backgrounds would be invited, and students would have the opportunity to visit with the guests to learn about their careers.

I mentioned last week that for the first 12 years at my school, I was the only school counselor. The thought of pulling off the career day event seemed monumental. I soon learned about Career Cafe on School Counselor Blog, and I wanted to try to implement that idea in my program.

Once the second counselor was assigned to my school, I told her about Career Cafe. We put our heads together and came up with a plan to make it happen. We created a letter detailing what we wanted our guests to do and how their visit would be planned. We assigned each guest to their own day for 30 minutes.

If you don’t already know, Career Cafe is held during the students’ lunchtime. We focused on 5th graders, so each day during their 30-minute lunch period in March, we would have a guest speaker. The students were given the opportunity to sign up for the careers they were most interested in learning about.

We started working on filling our calendar for Career Cafe in January so there would be plenty of time to find a variety of careers to share with our students. There would be a day or two here and there when we wouldn’t have a guest, but we did our best to find a guest for each day.

Our takeaways: There were a limited number of spots per day. We used a classroom for the visits, and we tried to keep our numbers limited to a class size of twenty 5th graders per day. We found after a few days that many of the same students were coming each day. Some just didn’t remember to sign up.

Over time, we changed the sign up process so students from each of the 5th grade classes had an opportunity to sign up. That helped some, but what we began to realize is that sign-ups for guests whose careers were popular with our students got filled quickly and many students didn’t get the chance to experience those learning opportunities. Little did we know, a pandemic was looming which would end up changing everything. And this is how the virtual career fair came about.

The Virtual Career Fair Transition

In 2020 we obviously had to cancel our plans for a Career Cafe. Even though schools opened back up in the fall, there were many covid protocols in place around guests on campus and mixing of students.

We knew early on that we wanted to come up with a virtual career fair model for Career Cafe. We gave our 5th graders a survey to find out which careers they were interested in learning about the most. As we had done in the past, we reached out to parents who were interested in sharing about their careers. We also reached out to a few new community contacts and some who had already participated in the past.

The great thing about the virtual career fair model is that all of our 5th graders were able to hear from every guest speaker. We still scheduled the virtual career fair visits during lunch, so we still called it Career Cafe. The students all ate lunch in their classrooms. The teachers would login to the Google Meet and share the guest on their SMARTBoards. We also allowed in-person students to still login using their Chromebooks. This allowed them to ask questions in the chat. Two of the four classes were virtual, so there were always students present in the Googlel Meet.

We dedicated the month of March, as we always have, as Career Month, and we scheduled as many dates as we could get guests for. As I mentioned earlier, our goal has always been to fill up all of the school days in March with Career Cafe guests. It was somewhat of a challenge that year, but it came together well. After our first virtual career fair, we decided that regardless of the pandemic status, hosting it that way would reach all of our students instead of just a select few.

We had all sorts of guests from artist Shawn Ethridge of Shawn Ethridge Art to Sean Cannell from Think Media on YouTube. We had an evening news anchor, a photographer, a traveling nurse, and we even had a virtual tour of the neighborhood fire department. Our students were able to learn about careers they wanted to hear more about as well as some they didn’t realize they wanted to know more about.

Virtual Career Fair - Savvy School Counselor — Shawn Etheridge of Shawn Etheridge Art

Another plus was that our guests were able to stream from their work places in some instances and share even more with the students than they would have been able to had they presented in person. It was really a great learning time for all of our 5th graders.

There are so many great ways to promote career awareness with your students. Hosting a virtual career fair month is just another idea to consider. If implementing it for an entire month is not an option, you can always sprinkle them in throughout the entire school year. We focused on 5th grade, but you can reach as many grade levels as you’d like and right from their classrooms.

Do you host career fairs or career cafe at your school?

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