High Schools + Corporate Volunteers = Career Orientation.com
More than 100,000 students complete their high school studies annually and then take up work or decide to continue their studies. They will be Hungary’s new CEOs, doctors, cooks, engineers and teachers. Our goal is to help high school students to make the most decision-making choices about their future: career choices, even before choosing a specific job or university degree.
The AmCham Career Orientation Program was created to meet the career choices of 9-12. In the classroom, high school students are informed about the labor market opportunities available to them with the help of corporate volunteers.
How does the AmCham Career Orientation Program work?
If you would like to participate in the program, the first and most important step is to register on the site:
- I’m a school representative
- I want to have a career orientation lesson
The process of the program
Corporate volunteers, also known as “Career Ambassadors”, present a lecture, a group session, a workshop, or an interactive lesson throughout the country at any high school that joins the program. During the lessons, the world of work is presented with practical examples and their own personal experiences, tells about their own career, and students can ask questions, so they can get first-hand information about the labor market, its actors, different sectors, industries and career paths.
The karrierorientacio.hu site plays a link between secondary schools and Career Ambassadors. After registering on the site, they can contact the corporate volunteers and schools.
After the contact, the agreed time is recorded by the Carrier and the school contact between the events on their profile page (in the calendar) and after the visit it is also possible to evaluate the held lecture.
We would like to thank TATA Consultancy Services for helping pro bono create this platform that we have dreamed of.
How do I participate as a school?
We will ask for a few steps registration, which is good if you have a school ID of your school at hand!
Please click here for more information.
How do I participate as a corporate volunteer?
Once you have completed a short form, your registration is ready.
Please click here for more information.
Content help, knowledge base
To support the work of our volunteers, we have developed a modular educational toolkit and a collection of links to STEM and language learning to help design your Career Ambassadors more easily and effectively. The educational material is located under Knowledge Base.
Who organizes the program? And why?
The Career Orientation Program is a program launched by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) to bring high school students closer to the world of the labor market, to provide them with information about the expectations and opportunities of the labor market, to motivate, inspire and assist them in choosing a career path. From 2017 onwards, the Career Orientation Day has been included in the curriculum of public education, and we would like to actively support schools and teachers with the help of corporate volunteers.
In 2011, the American Chamber of Commerce, an independent, nonprofit advocacy organization, established the Language Ambassador Program to emphasize the importance of intensive secondary school language learning. The initiative, which won the CSR Best Practice Award of the Hungarian Public Relations Association in 2011, has more than 10,000 students in over 130 schools with the participation of 60 chambers.
There was a growing demand from schools for lecturers to talk to their students about their companies and their labor market experiences, so we set up our Career Ambassador program in 2015, with our dozens of member companies invited over the past three years to provide insights to a successful company.
In addition, the Chamber has a continuous dialogue with business representatives, educational institutions and responsible ministries. Two important lessons were learned during the discussions:
- Educational institutions rarely have close links with labor market actors, and they do not see what expectations students should be prepared for. Thus, students do not have sufficient information about what awaits them at the end of their studies on the market.
- Pupils are unaware of the opportunities at home, little is known about companies, professions, positions, skills needed, and programs to help locate, train or gain experience.
These discoveries, and the experiences and feedback of the past few years, have led us to create our Career Orientation Program by integrating and rethinking our Language and Career Tracking programs.
And what is AmCham?
The American Chamber of Commerce is an independent, self-sustaining non-profit organization founded by 32 US companies in 1989 for advocacy purposes. The goal of the 360-member organization today is to be the leading representative of American and international business in Hungary and to contribute to the country’s international competitiveness.
AmCham’s membership is responsible for 37 percent of Hungarian exports and has a network of over 222,000 employees.
More about us.
