Maine Community Coordinators Collaborative (Maine C3 ), in collaboration with the Association of Computer Technology Educators in Maine (ACTEM) and Educate Maine offered a unique opportunity for high school students across Maine, from Caribou to Kittery, to engage together in real-time with representatives from a wide swath of cross-sector Maine companies and nonprofit organizations.
During the Maine Virtual Career Fair, students self-selected from the 168 live-streamed sessions and learned about the unique job expectations, skills, and potential career pathways of different jobs in large and small Maine companies and nonprofit organizations.
For students, the ME Virtual Career Fair offered a window to feed their curiosity, aspirations, plans and actions towards a vision they have for themselves. For teachers who attended the sessions with their students, the ME Virtual Career Fair offered an opportunity to make direct connections among the learning targets in their classrooms across all content areas and the skills, understandings, and context of the job expectations and potential career pathways to the jobs. For Maine companies and nonprofit organizations, the ME Virtual Career Fair provided an opportunity to make connections with students, be a part of building student aspirations, and offer examples of the value of living and working in Maine.
During the live-streamed sessions, students communicated with the presenters by typing their questions into a chat space. The 30 minute live-streamed sessions gave students ample time to deepen their understandings with follow-up questions. Maine C3 educators served as the moderator of the sessions by keeping the questions flowing and making connections. Presenters often shared their own career journeys to their current positions, sometimes surprising students in the way skills, knowledge, and experiences build and transfer across career clusters.
The ME Virtual Career Fair offered a dynamic, professional career exploration experience for Maine high school students to engage with companies and nonprofit organizations from across Maine and hear the thoughts and questions from other students. The concept for the virtual career fair grew out of a deep desire to create a statewide experience and offer all high school students the opportunity to explore a variety of career options together in real-time and see possibilities for their lives. Maine C3 has created an experience worth repeating and they are committed to making this an annual event.
For questions regarding Maine C3 and the 2021 ME Virtual Career Fair, contact Planning Committee Co-Chairs, Samantha Brink at sbrink@sanford.org or Sheree Inman at inmansh@spsdme.org.
For questions regarding the Maine Learning Results Life and Career Ready standards contact Maine DOE Life and Career Ready Education Specialist, Diana Doiron at diana.doiron@maine.gov or 207-592-2128.