Business TED-Ed

Click Your Fortune: TED-Ed’s choose-your-own-adventure look at careers

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By Logan Smalley

In a job market where many top jobs didn’t even exist a decade ago, how can teachers help prepare students for careers that haven’t been invented yet? While preparing students for careers is not the sole purpose of education, it’s clear that teachers and guidance counselors are working hard to help students understand their post-graduation options. How do guidance counselors help students understand the jobs that are already available? And how do students, educators and counselors find out what jobs might be options in the future?

There are many answers to these questions, and schools and education organizations are becoming quite resourceful in setting students up for 21st-century success. However, according to many teachers and students in the TED-Ed community, there’s still work to be done to bridge the knowledge gap between what happens in school and what happens in the modern workplace.

With this challenge in mind, TED-Ed set out to design an interactive, open-ended series that helps young learners find out more about careers they’re interested in … and careers they simply never knew existed.

The series is called “Click Your Fortune,” Above, check out the introduction.

Click Your Fortune was created in the style of “choose your own adventure.” Each video features four professionals (selected from among the attendees and speakers of TEDGlobal 2013) reading career-related questions submitted directly by students. Once all four questions are read, the viewer can click the paths that relate to their interests.

Students can also suggest questions, participants and careers to be featured in future videos. Yes, this series is a work in progress — because we believe it has to be. Career options change fast, and we want to ensure that the series is serving the actual, and always evolving, curiosities of young learners.

The TED-Ed team is excited to get feedback from teachers and guidance counselors regarding the usefulness of this series’ approach. We’re also extremely excited to see some brave students already suggesting content for the next batch of Click Your Fortune Videos!

Edit: Thanks, readers, for your heads-up on the misleading statistic attributed to a Department of Labor report. It is not accurate to say that 65% of school-aged kids will work in jobs that are not yet invented. After reviewing the report to which the stat was attributed, it has been removed from the story.