As Australia celebrates National Careers Week from May 13-19, careers adviser Melissa Parrish from Lisarow High School features in a new promotional video compiled by the NSW Department of Education.
Parrish, who has been working in the field for about 17 years, said one of the main attractions of the role was how varied it was.
“You can be working with students one-on-one, you can be teaching careers education in the classroom or you can be delivering presentations to target groups,” she said.
“The thing I enjoy most is working with industry and community to give students opportunities to work in various industries to help them work out their future occupation.”
Parrish said she enjoyed helping to guide students in the right direction.
“Students might have specialised areas of interest, they might be creative or scientific, and I suggest careers linked to those areas – sometimes they are jobs they didn’t even know were available,” she said.
Also featured in the video is a former student, now a commissioned artist, who talks about how advice received from Parrish helped shape her career.
“I love collaborating and linking industry experiential learning to syllabus outcomes to enhance student engagement,” Parrish said.
She takes a highly collaborative approach to the career education program at Lisarow High School and has developed sustainable partnerships to deliver vocational and enterprise learning, career and transition, workplace learning and vocational education programs for all students.
“With students unlikely to follow a single career trajectory across their lifetimes, it is paramount that we equip students with self-management skills to enable them to meet the demands of the ever-changing workforce and promote lifelong learning,” she said.
“As a careers adviser, I love the fast-paced, dynamic environment, which allows me to partner with and support faculty, teams, other schools and the wider community to benefit our students.”
Parrish currently leads the Central Coast Careers Advisers network and designs professional learning workshops for meetings based on her research around industry growth areas specific to the Central Coast region.
Being a careers adviser is a dynamic and demanding job.
Each day they navigate a myriad of tasks, from providing one-on-one student support to disseminating the latest career information, teaching career education classes, co-ordinating career events and facilitating education-to-work transition programs.
Careers Advisers are qualified secondary teachers who have completed an approved course of study in careers education.
National Careers Week celebrates careers, career development, career development services and career development practitioners and promotes career development’s economic, social, and personal benefits.
It is an initiative of the Career Industry Council of Australia.
For more information go to https://careersweek.com.au/