What are the advantages of Career-Related Programme?

SISD has always been committed to giving our students options, whether that means implementing a tailor-made curriculum designed to meet individual student needs, or offering students the Work Placement Initiative and allowing them to decide where to receive their first taste of the workplace. Now, we’ve just been authorised to offer the International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme (CP), a brand-new framework that exists alongside the Diploma Programme (DP), which represents a new choice for students who want to focus on learning career-related skills in advanced preparation for working life. Read on to find out what the CP is, and how it differs from the DP!

The Career-related programme

The CP is designed as an alternative to the DP, containing a mix of some of the DP’s requirements while also introducing new career and specialist instruction that are geared towards practical workplace skills. This is best exemplified in how it modifies the IB learner profile with certain specialist skills, as seen here:

• Academically strong
• Skilled in a practical field
• Critical and ethical thinkers
• Self-directed
• Collaborative
• Resilient and determined
• Confident and assured
• Caring and reflective
• Inquirers

The CP core is also significantly divergent from the DP’s courses, and are broken down into the following components: Personal and professional skills, a course that develops soft skills, attitudes, and strategies that are designed to be transferred to the workplace; Service learning, in which students develop skills and knowledge in a way that’s designed to meet a specific need in the community; Reflective project, where students identify ethical issues that they’ve uncovered in their career-related studies, research them, and discuss them in a meaningful way; And language development, where students are encouraged to be proficient in a language other than their mother tongue - an essential skill in the 21st-century workplace.

Advantages of the CP

There’s no doubt that the IB DP is a powerful tool for students in preparing them for the future, and any IB graduates will be provided with valuable insight and experience into university life, the workplace as a whole, and becoming part of the greater global community. However, because of their unique specialist education, CP graduates are especially equipped to enter the workforce, having a clearer background in understanding how to navigate the workforce, especially a globalised one. The additional multilingual exposure requirement of the CP also confers the advantages of bilingualism that we’ve discussed many times in the past. This helps elevate IB CP students in a way similar to the Bilingual Diploma framework. CP students are also provided with greater freedom of choice regarding their path after graduation, expanding their horizons beyond tertiary education. Armed with the skills they develop in the CP, they may pursue other professional studies, or enter the workforce immediately after graduation. Our Deputy Head of Secondary School Martin Keon summarizes the importance of the CP as a choice for our students:

“The IBCP is an important and exciting addition to our curriculum pathways as it now provides our students with further choice in the higher grade levels to more closely follow studies that are relevant to their interests and talents. “With three initial pathways in Sports coaching, Hospitality and Business available from September 2021, as time progresses we hope to offer even more pathways to meet the needs of our growing community. The real strength of the programme is how it combines the rigour of DP courses and the career-related studies of the chosen pathway which allows the student to select DP courses that complement their chosen career pathway which will allow them to apply their learning in the most authentic way and carve out an educational experience that directly meets their needs. In September 2020, BTEC Business was added to Secondary School offerings in Grades 9 and 10 to provide students with a grounding in the course ahead of choosing IBDP or IBCP Business options. At SISD, students who meet the requirements in terms of course choices can also be eligible for a bilingual IB CP.”

We look forward to meeting our first wave of CP students, and seeing where their career-related studies take them!