Career week ends at Wesley College

“Career days” have become a trademark of just about every Belizean high school, and Wesley College is no exception. In fact, since Monday fourth formers of the high school have been participating in various activities as part of career week. Today, News 5’s Janelle Chanona stopped by the campus to find out the tricks of a few Belizean trades.

Janelle Chanona, Reporting

Over the last two days, fourth formers of Wesley College have been paying keen attention to the several guest speakers who agreed to participate in the school’s career week. The theme for this year is “Career Exploration: Opening doors to a rewarding future.”

Elizabeth Goff, Counsellor, Wesley College

“This has been something that Wesley College has been involved in for many years. And it is very useful, because we need to help our students to plan ahead. So the focus of the week is actually to help them to explore careers as well as to plan for further education.

We started the week with a motivational talk, sort of helping them to get ready for the week, to focus, the importance of planning, and that was done on Monday afternoon. On Tuesday, our students did a tour of St. John’s College Jr. College. Wednesday we had the University of Belize with a full team, seven persons. Yesterday was option one, and today we have option two to five.”

Familiar faces from various professions took time out of their busy schedules to speak to the students about the ‘nitty-gritty’ details of their jobs.

Elizabeth Goff

“We have careers like communications, meteorology, tourism, accounting and banking, helping professions, counselling and social work. A new area and we’ve been really excited about this, archaeology, we’ve never really offered archaeology as a session and this year we had eleven students who signed up. We really feel good about that because it shows that their options are bigger in terms of exploration and that’s wonderful.

Just by interacting with them in between sessions, I am getting a lot of positive feedback and I feel very hopeful that all the information that they have been learning will be put to good use.”

In the new year, the students will be participating in the school’s two-week internship programme to get some “hands-on” experience. Reporting for News 5, I am Janelle Chanona.

While the perks and fringe benefits of the various professions were hot topics, salary scales seem to have been the main concern for the students.