Experiential Learning Helps Prepare New Brunswick’s Future Workforce
Experiential learning plays a key role in supporting New Brunswick’s next-generation workforce, in and out of the classroom, by enhancing what students are being taught in school with workplace and community-centered learning experiences.
Ransford Lockhart, Experiential Learning Lead with the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD), said experiential learning helps create career awareness – and ultimately supports student success.
“Our aim is to enhance awareness of the career opportunities available to students here in New Brunswick. It’s not about creating workers. It is about providing opportunities for students to understand, and experience, future career possibilities” he says.
The Future NB K-12 initiative is looking to inspire students to find what they’re passionate about.
Lockhart added, “we want to provide students with opportunities to explore, discover, partake, and access hands-on learning experiences to help them discover what they want to do following high-school graduation.”
One of the most direct routes experiential learning can take is mentorship. Mentorship creates connections between community members and students. These connections strengthen the link between academic theory and real-life practicality.
Lockhart said students can gain experiences and insights from mentors in many ways, such as: work placements, presentations, studies, panelists, guest speeches, Q&A sessions, interviews, and job shadowing.
Lockhart noted, “essentially, mentors provide students with exposure to the kind of expertise they would need in order to access their preferred career path.”
“There are many ways for employers to engage with students, based on willingness and capacity to do so,” said Lockhart, adding that, “engagement can be anything from a 30-minute site visit to a six-month work placement.”
Providing experiential learning opportunities may only require a small investment of time on behalf of the partner yet can have significant impacts on the development of future talent within the province.
Lockhart identified the fact that “there are a wide variety of options and pathways for people to engage in. A 30-minute commitment can be sometimes just as significant as a longer contribution.”
The focus on adding in experiential learning activities enhances students’ learning, complementing, and supporting, what’s taught in a classroom setting. Lockhart noted, “this can also provide many other benefits such as: creating career awareness, closing skills gaps and creating connections between employers and the future workforce.”
“Future NB works directly in the middle – acting as a connecting mechanism. At the end of the day, it’s a win-win for everyone” he added.
By bridging the gap between employers’ and students’ passions, experiential learning can fill the growing provincial need for future talent.
Lockhart said experiential learning provides vast benefits for students, whether through virtual experiences like video presentations, mock interviews, tours or demonstrations on careers and ethics, workplace safety, or in-person site visits, industry tours, job shadowing, fieldwork, or volunteering.
It’s a great tool for students who may otherwise have low levels of engagement. It provides an opportunity for them to say, ‘oh, this is what I’m learning, and now, through my experiential learning opportunity, I can see how this concept is applied in real-life.’”
They can say, ‘oh, cool, I know about that and actually did that,’ rather than, ‘I read from a book or talked about it in class.’”
Experiential learning opportunities should not be limited to those students in the higher grade levels. Students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 can access the many opportunities that exist through experiential learning.
“We’re focused on the whole spectrum from K-12. If you’re an employer who wants to engage, there are many options. We can come to you and share the wide range of engagement options,” said Lockhart.
Providing these opportunities for students, employers and mentors is timely, with New Brunswick’s growing need for competent and skilled workers, including a robust labour market and 120,000 job openings predicted within the next decade.
With a provincial population of more than 780,000, that many job openings provides huge opportunities. For New Brunswick youth to be aware of these opportunities and to have experiences that demonstrate how to make a living in the province is game-changing,” said Lockhart.
To build links between future talent and employers, the department is launching four Centres of Excellence (COEs) – in Energy, Entrepreneurship, Health, and Digital Ecosystems. Each will offer central mechanisms to support virtual and in-person experiential learning opportunities across the K-12 spectrum. This provides a mechanism to forge partnerships with the province’s various industries and partners and to support education across all sectors, drawing on, and generating, experiential learning opportunities for the students to access.
Led by teachers, the COEs focus on building co-operative learning opportunities and engaging with partners throughout the province, as well as offering remote education opportunities. Equitable access is a cornerstone of the COE model and, as such, students from anywhere in the province, urban or rural, can engage with the many opportunities being created in collaboration with Centre partners.
“These opportunities can aid in bolstering career awareness among students and provide insight into what these Centres can offer in terms of possible career paths,” said Lockhart.
“In a nutshell, these Centres act as a centralized mechanism to support virtual and experiential learning opportunities, from sector-specific partners to the entire K-12 system.”
When it is all said and done, the possibilities are endless and opportunities almost limitless.
If you would like to become involved in supporting New Brunswick youth by helping them to explore career pathways, please visit futurenewbrunswick.ca or email: [email protected].