How to Use Ellii's Career Summary Charts

At Ellii, we have a variety of lessons, resources, courses, and visuals that you can use in your classes to explore career pathways.

If your students are not quite ready for full workplace courses, our Career Pathways lesson section offers simple lessons on a variety of jobs categorized by career cluster.

These exploratory digital lessons are intended for high-beginner to low-intermediate learners. At Ellii, we understand that digital literacy is an essential skill to explore with your students.

If you haven't tried assigning digital lessons with your adult learners, this is a great section to start with. The digital lessons in this section follow a simple, familiar template. We use straightforward instructions and a consistent lesson flow to help your students become comfortable with our most common digital task types: vocabulary, reading and listening, comprehension, and quiz. You can also use these lessons with higher-level students by incorporating extra communicative tasks—ideas we'll be sharing in this post. 

Note: We are also in the process of adding an optional speaking task (with sentence frames) to each lesson for students who want to give this task type a try. Here is an example of a lesson that has this task. See the last task: Is this a career for you?

What's new? 

In addition to adding dozens of new digital lessons to this section, we've added one-page printable career summaries to each Career Pathways lesson. This handout gives students something physical to hold on to and take notes on as they work through the digital lesson. You can print these summaries out or present and annotate them on a whiteboard. By default, your students will receive the PDF in their assignment when you add it to a class (unless you uncheck the PDF box—see below). You can add a note if you want students to use or print the PDF. Please show your students exactly where to find the PDF handout on their student dashboard.

Where teachers include the PDF version (and where students can find it)

Here is what the career summaries look like. 

Below are some suggested activities that you can do with these additional handouts either before or after you work through the related lesson.

Warm-ups

Before doing or assigning the full lesson, present the summary chart and give students a chance to write down anything they know or want to know about the profession. Ask for a show of hands to find out:

• if students are interested in doing this type of work
• why students might or might not be drawn to this career
• what related jobs there might be
• if they know anyone who does this work—and if so, what that person likes or doesn't like about their job
• how this job compares to another career you've been discussing in class

Pair & group activities

The classroom setting is ideal for exploring these summaries further. Here are some activity ideas:

Jigsaw Expert: Give each student a different career to summarize and then put students in groups to share what they've learned. Encourage students to jot down notes from the discussion onto their chart.

Speed Dating: Each student gets a different career chart to ask and answer questions about for a short, timed exchange.

Mock Interviews: Distribute a variety of career summary charts and place students in pairs to role-play as interviewer and interviewee for the career they receive.

Writing & research

Paragraph Summary: Invite students to write a paragraph summarizing the information from the chart.

Job Ads: Have students write a short job ad for the career based on information from the chart and the reading.

Compare & Contrast: Encourage students to compare this career to another one you've already covered. Provide some useful sentence stems to support the writing.

One More Thing: After completing the lesson, have students add one thing they learned from the reading that isn't already on the chart. Take it a step further by encouraging them to do a little research of their own—what's one thing they could teach someone else about this career that wasn't covered in class?

Is this Career for Me?: Encourage students to journal informally about the careers you explore. Is this a career worth considering? Why or why not? This will also be an optional speaking task in each lesson (coming soon).

What ideas do you have for using these career summaries in a classroom setting?