Career Quest: A look into SMSD’s new career matching program, YouScience

Shawnee Mission School District recently introduced YouScience, a career searching program, to middle and high school students to help them find possible jobs best suited for their natural skills and interests. 

“[YouScience is] not your typical career interest inventory,” East Instructional Coach Kristopher Barikmo said. “The idea behind it is identifying our cognitive strengths, as well as our interests, and then bringing those together to help us understand what our path could look like.”

YouScience has up-to-date information on over 500 careers featuring job outlooks, education investments and a personal profile of best-fit careers.

The district, along with several other metro area schools and districts, received a grant from the Kauffman Foundation earlier this year that allowed them to partner with YouScience.

YouScience has 11 assessments, divided into five sections, that students were supposed to complete during seminar from Nov. 20 through Dec. 10. But despite the administration’s promotion of the tool, the turnout for participation was low.

East admin realized that not all students will follow this schedule, so to encourage them, those who completed their assessments before Dec. 18 had their name entered in a raffle to win a $50 gift card — students who finished before Dec. 11 got two entries in the raffle.

Despite their attempts to motivate students to complete the activities, only 111 students have finished the YouScience exercises as of Dec. 15. — the lowest amount of participation in any of the SMSD high schools.

Junior Chris Alka has completed aptitudes, interests and personality tests two days a week during seminar. Although he doesn’t feel his career matches are perfect, he’s still found helpful information in his personality results.  

“I believe that YouScience doesn’t have all of the attributes it would take to go into a career, but it definitely showed me some of my strong suits data-wise, such as visually how I learn or how mentally I learn,” Alka said. “It gives you a more visual way of showing that, and it kind of opened my eyes to what I could be compared to just something I knew before.”

Not only will the program guide students to possible career paths, but YouScience’s evaluations of student responses will provide them with colleges suitable for each suggested career path. It will also give information about personal abilities that could be used to improve college application essays, resumes, interviews and recommendation letters.

In order to produce these in-depth results, students must complete a set of assessments that YouScience refers to as “Brain Games.” These puzzles and challenges evaluate students’ abilities in different fields including inductive reasoning, work approach and timeframe orientation.

Out of the 11 Brain Games assessments that YouScience gives, nine are aptitude tests and two are self-reported surveys about personal interests.

“YouScience allows us to bring what we’re good at and what we’re passionate about and then find a much better answer for helping us figure out those paths,” Barikmo said.

On average, according to Barikmo, people change careers about four times in their life — not just their job, but their career path.

“We really want to equip students with more tools, more perspectives and more opportunities to explore careers and options, because then that reduces perhaps the amount of fumbling through college that somebody might have to do,” Barikmo said.

Sophomore Tatum Aikin has been working on her YouScience Brain Games and finds that the concept of determining possible careers based on how one’s brain works is more accurate than typical personality tests.

“A lot of the time we think we know what we want to do and what we’ll be good at,” Aikin said. “But a lot of the time we don’t really know what career paths that we want to go into actually entails. So, then matching up how we do on these brain activities to careers and like seeing how they match up, I think it’ll be a lot more beneficial.”

In previous years, SMSD students participated in a similar career planning program called Xello. However, Xello solely uses self-reported surveys rather than tests that evaluate actual skills. 

“When we used Xello for this process in previous years, the number one flagged career was artist, because it just asked people what they were interested in, and if they liked creative things well then it said you should be an artist, and the second most popular was a professional athlete,” Barikmo said. “Now are we going to have artists and professional athletes that come from East? Absolutely, we will. But those aren’t going to be our top career matches.”

Although the district introduced YouScience, Xello will still be used since both platforms provide different tools and information.

“[YouScience is] about getting a chance to know more about yourself than you could just by grades, or just by being in a classroom,” Barikmo said. “We have to know what we’re good at, and our skills in order to begin to see what our future can look like.”