Career Guidance as a Culture for a School
Jared Molko, Founder of Yenza | ACSI Service Provider
I struggled in my younger years, not knowing what to do for a career while my friends all had clearly laid out plans. Not getting good guidance when I needed it cost me critical time and my parents money, as I chopped and changed my mind. It wasn’t intentional at first, but in hindsight, this is why I wanted to build a career guidance company.
On average, only about one in 3,000 South African students has access to a professional counsellor or educational psychologist. Even in schools that employ one, that person is carrying hundreds of learners, the crisis cases and the university applications. It’s simply too much for one person to handle properly. The good news is that both having an online platform and culture that supports career guidance across the entire school, means many micro-moments can have a lasting positive effect.
A Grade 10 girl hears “you’ve got a real head for this” from her Maths teacher and remembers it for a decade. A boy who is told he talks too much but never hears that the same quality is worth good money in sales, is a missed opportunity. These critical moments can easily be turned into meaningful career conversations. So, the question for a staffroom isn’t who owns career guidance. It’s whether career guidance can be baked into the core values of the school.
Three simple things that help in those critical moments:
- Name the strength, then name where it goes
- “You’re good at this” ends a conversation. “You’re good at this, and it’s the same thinking radiographers and actuaries use” starts one. The second half takes ten seconds and is the half a learner remembers.
- Ask why before what
- “What do you want to be?” invites a rehearsed answer, usually to please the parents. “Which part of school do you lose track of time in, and why?” gets you something real to work with.
- Bring evidence to the parent conversation
- Most subject choice conflicts are a parent’s picture of their child colliding with a student or teacher’s opinion. Having a scientific and diagnostic platform like Yenza serves as a wonderful tool to navigate these tricky conversations.
Incorporating career guidance as a culture or operating system, done deliberately across a whole staff, compounds. One group of South African schools measured it. They surveyed 250 learners before and after using Yenza and having our team train their staff. Self-reported confidence in career direction moved from 5.5 to 8.2 out of ten. That is the shift from “I have some ideas” to “I know what I’m choosing, and I can tell you why”. Across the same window, 2022 to 2025, the schools recorded an 18% improvement in academic performance. The correlation of improved academics was attributed to subject alignment (strengths, interests, aptitude) and a simple truism that children work harder at things when they understand the why, and the what for.
In a Christian school this isn’t an add-on to the mission. Every learner has a calling or passion they want to pursue. Helping them to see it, and helping them to believe that they can go out into the world and make it happen, is closer to stewardship than it is to admin.
So, some questions worth reflecting on:
- Which learner in my class has a strength nobody has ever named out loud?
- When last did I tell a learner where their ability could actually take them?
- If we asked our Grade 9s why they chose their subjects, what would they say?
Career guidance isn’t a programme one assigned teacher runs once a year. It’s a culture. It says the school’s job doesn’t end at the matric results, and that every staff member has a role to play.
