ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a secondary school’s focus on developing their students’ career competencies and work-ready skills by working with employers and external business professionals to help their students make the transition from education to employment shorter, easier and more focussed. The ASPIRE coaching programme, developed at the Axe Valley Community College in East Devon, provides a practical example of the integration of a positive psychology and coaching intervention in the educational context. One of the strengths of the ASPIRE programme is that it takes its students on a journey of self-discovery, supporting the development of competencies from a young age and enabling the students to take responsibility for their own life and career choices as early as possible within their secondary-school education. Along the way, we describe the benefits of the programme to the students, outline the lessons learned during implementation and make recommendations for improvements. We conclude the chapter with the suggestion that work psychologists, employers and schools should work together to develop education to employment interventions that provide students with support in developing their top five strengths and career competencies through undertaking coaching and acquiring peer-coaching skills. Additionally, extending current research by adopting and analysing the usefulness of the Career Adapt-ability scales (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012) with young people earlier in the educational system, together with the adoption of fully integrated positive strengths-based interventions such as the Strengths Gym (Proctor & Fox Eades, 2009, quoted in Proctor et al., 2011), would be useful next steps for secondary schools to consider.
