In today's rapidly changing world, the future of work is defined by uncertainty and shaped by rapid technological advancements. The emergence of new roles and opportunities continually demands a distinct set of skills and competencies.

As we navigate this dynamic landscape, it’s crucial to ensure every child and youth has access to quality career education that equips them to thrive in future careers in an evolving economy.

The importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration for career education that’s globally informed and locally led

Career education needs to draw on insights from global contexts while remaining firmly grounded in the specific realities of communities. This ensures career readiness activities are locally led, tailored to address the needs and to match the circumstances of each community.

Local practices are significantly strengthened when they draw upon rigorous global research that offers proven strategies tested across diverse settings to provide a solid framework for practice. At the same time, local practices can’t be effective without being relevant and as such, they must be locally driven—an approach that necessitates robust collaboration between stakeholders both global and local, including educators, industry leaders, local communities and researchers.

The Career Readiness Education Framework is an example of impactful multi-stakeholder collaboration to guide globally informed and locally led career education initiatives and activities. The framework has been used in school-industry partnerships to enhance career education activities in over 25 countries across 5 continents.

Supported by Teach For All and DHL Group, the framework provides educators and student-facing practitioners with a robust and adaptable tool as well as knowledge. It draws on OECD career readiness research studies and what we’re learning from Teach For All’s Future of Work Initiative as well as DHL Group’s GoTeach Program that equips students in under-served communities with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a rapidly changing job market and to make a positive impact on their communities.

The collaboration between Teach For All and DHL Group around the framework continues to evolve, informed by its progress, ongoing learning and emerging local needs. The collaboration now includes support to strengthen local research capacity and foster evidence-based insights and knowledge to improve local career education provision and inform global research with locally led, evidence-based knowledge.

Accelerating the delivery of impactful career education

Teach For All, with the support of DHL Group, has launched the Career Education and Leadership Accelerator so that partners can apply for grants to implement the Career Readiness Education Framework and integrate a research component to:

• Develop robust resources to guide stakeholders—including educators, corporate volunteers and other practitioners—in delivering effective and relevant career education
• Use findings to enhance the quality of career education provision, ensuring it meets the needs of learners across the communities we work with
• Deliver evidence-based knowledge to inform global research, enhancing its relevance across diverse contexts
• Enable a collective approach that involves other organizations and stakeholders to further scale the framework’s impact.

For the first year of the accelerator’s pilot phase (2024-2025), 5 project proposals have been selected to undertake research in underserved schools in Argentina, Cambodia, Mexico, Peru and Spain after students have completed at least 3 activities from the framework.

The research will assess the impact of framework activities, including contributing factors, and the effect of collaboration between educators, employers and the community. Additionally, it will explore how students actively contribute to their career readiness activities.

Teach For Cambodia’s accelerator project aims to expand its career education program from serving 270 students to over 8,000 across 22 state-run schools.

The development of evaluation and impact assessment tools will support this significant growth by enabling Teach For Cambodia to monitor and assess the quality of its career education program and inform how to grow its reach and impact.

The project will also provide evidence-based insights to inform how to enhance collaboration between teachers, school leaders and employers to ensure positive outcomes for students and to expand career education opportunities to more students—insights that can also be used for greater advocacy efforts.

As we implement these pilot projects, we will continue to spread what we learn both locally and globally and identify partners to expand the impact of the accelerator, ensuring more students benefit from impactful career education.