National Career Awareness Project

An announcement from the Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE):

We're delighted to announce the National Career Awareness Project. This project is supported by the Literacy and Information and Communication System's (LINCS) Regional Resource Center Region 1. On October 1, the LINCS project was transferred to the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education from the National Institute for Literacy. The overall goal of the National Career Awareness Project is to increase and improve adult learners' career awareness and planning throughout all levels of the ESOL, ABE, and Adult Secondary Education spectrum by helping adult education program staff incorporate career awareness and planning into their instruction and counseling activities.

The project offers state teams the opportunity to explore the career planning process using the Integrating Career Awareness into the ABE/ESOL Classroom (ICA) curriculum. The ICA curriculum guide provides classroom-ready, flexible lessons, handouts, and online resources to prepare instructors and counselors to guide adult students through a career awareness and planning process. Teams will develop a customized approach to implementing the curriculum guide with the support of a group of peers and facilitators/advisors with expertise in the area of career exploration and planning.

Interested states will designate a state team leader to recruit and select four programs based on the attached criteria and application, to participate on the state team. The state team leader submits a single application for the entire state team.

The project provides the opportunity for up to 15 states to participate in either of two project rounds. The first project round for 7-8 eight states is January-June, 2011, and the second project round for another 7-8 states is July-December, 2011. All states are eligible to apply for either project round. Preference will be given to states whose team includes local programs that were not previously engaged in the New England Career Awareness pilot.

Applications are due by December 1, 2010. Only complete applications with state director signatures will be considered.

October 14 Letter to State Directors / Application Packet

Questions may be directed to Sandy Goodman.