Radar Maker Web Development & Design

As we’re now in the final testing phase of My Future, I feel it’s a good time to introduce it properly. We will shortly be releasing it as a free download and hope to partner with educational groups to distribute it on CD. If anyone is interested in helping with distribution, please contact us.

Back in 2005, when we were still working in Cape Town with Mamelani, we came up with the concept of a practical career guidance programme that was specifically tailored to South African school children. The education system in South Africa is failing for a number of reasons, but the lack of adequate career guidance is one that’s had little attention.

With further research, we identified a fairly hefty number of issues that needed to be addressed:

• teachers being overburdened and lacking the skills or qualifications to deal with career guidance properly.
• lack of personal awareness among learners
• inability of learners to make choices.
• lack of interest from teachers
• narrow scope of guidance to choices that were mostly available in the past, e.g. nursing and teaching
• parents making choices instead of learners.
• guidance education not addressing the practical realities of job changes, redundancy and need for entrepreneurship.
• lack of information on careers and tertiary courses.
• learners enrolling in university with little idea of their objectives or studying the wrong subjects for their field of interest.
• poor quality of CV writing
• lack of access to educational resources due to majority of schools running old computers and little or no internet.

We collaborated with a career guidance specialist to develop the content and plan activities that we could make interactive, and output data that the teacher could use to help the learner. We wanted the software to be animated, with characters that school children from different backgrounds could identify with.

The idea was to create something fairly broad and substantial that would speak to children from a wide variety of backgrounds and “tell it like it is”. This idea was supported by a number of teachers we spoke to, who urged us to target the programme to as young an audience as possible and as honestly as possible.

The education figures tell a frightening story. Currently, only 14% of black and 17% of coloured South Africans over the age of 20 have a high school or higher qualification. The national pass rate for the end of school exams is around 65%, but only around 15% of the population study further at university. Of these, only 22% obtain an undergraduate degree. Too few teachers have the time or skills necessary to teach career education properly and students are being passed through the system with little direction or support.

Our aim is to paint this picture clearly to students (and teachers) and encourage them to plan better and make decent choices with what they have.

Teachers are given a manual and have password protected access to a back-end which displays data on each of their student’s answers. They can therefore use the software to help guide each learner individually.

The software has been developed using Flash and Zinc and will run on old computers (Windows 98 with 64MB RAM). I will be posting more updates with screenshots (and possibly a screencast) in the coming days.

The following is a breakdown of the course material:

1. Introduction

Introduction of the various characters
Reasons to study and get a job.
Positive and negative factors about each character.
Factors and choices.
What happened to the characters later on.

2. Gaining appropriate self-information

The importance of knowing yourself before making a career choice.
Build a picture of yourself.
Explanation of Holland’s personality types,
matching jobs to types
Holland’s activity - Learners input a series of answers and their personality type(s) is displayed.

3. Gaining career information

Collecting information about careers.
How to find career information.
Understanding what type of information to look for when researching careers

4. The decision making process

The need to make decisions and the decision making process.
The job interview

5. Planning a career

Life after school, planning your career and career realities.
Changing your career.

6. Entrepreneurship

What is entrepreneurship;
Steps to creating your own business;
Researching the business;
Creating a business plan;
Finding funding;
Putting your business plan into action.
Why is the business failing?

7. A reality check

The reality of the working world.
The importance of back up options.

8. How to write a CV

A step-by-step process for compiling a CV, including structure, content, layout and an example.

9. Job types

A comprehensive list of jobs is provided. The learners can search through the list by category or personality type to find out detailed information about what the jobs entail, what qualifications and personal requirements they need, and the number of hours they would likely be expected to work.

10. Tertiary education

This section provides a list of the various departments at the main tertiary institutions of South Africa, as well as all the relevant contact details for applications and bursaries.