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At a time when today’s youth are facing an uncertain economic landscape, climate anxiety and a growing mental health crisis, it is more important than ever to work to instill a sense of hope for their future. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be a powerful framework for incorporating hope and purpose into career conversations with students as a coach, educator or supervisor.
At Queen’s University, we created Work With Impact: The Queen’s Career Guide to the UN Sustainable Development Goals – a free tool designed to bridge the gap between abstract concepts and concrete student actions. The guide helps students connect personal values to career paths through exploration, reflection and real-world engagement. It explores each of the 17 goals and includes the skills needed to contribute to each goal, potential career paths, opportunities to get involved, and resources to support reflection and further research.
We’ve used the guide in workshops and appointments with positive student feedback, and have received requests from other universities to incorporate it into their work or develop their own version (please do – we are happy to talk about how we did it!). In this article, we share some ideas to help you guide students through career conversations using the SDG Career Guide. You can use these practices in one-on-one sessions, workshops or as in-class activities.
How the SDGs support career exploration
The Sustainable Development Goals can offer multiple benefits for career exploration and development. This framework can support students to:
- Get creative and curious: shift from a problem mindset to thinking of opportunities
- Connect to values and purpose: increase motivation and connection
- Shift to active hope: increase agency and well-being
- Make an impact: encourage contributions to a more sustainable future
Practices and activities
The ideas below are organized around Queen’s Career Services’ four-quadrant model of career development. Knowing when to draw on each idea depends on the student’s unique needs.
1. Know Yourself:Getting clarity on passions and values
Find key issues: Ask students what global issues (SDGs) matter most to them to anchor career exploration in their values. Use questions like “Why does this issue matter to you?” or “Can you give an example of what that looks like to you?” to spark deeper thinking about purpose and motivation.
Consider impact and inspiration: Have students consider the ways they have already had an impact or consider people who inspire them. These can serve as clues about what matters to them. Mind-mapping can be a helpful tool for combing through thoughts and experiences.
Including emotions in the conversation: Feelings about the state of the world can give clues about passions and values. Please note: these could include anxiety, grief or frustration, as well as hope and excitement. Explore trauma-informed ways of talking about potentially sensitive topics to ensure you are creating a safer space.
Supportive resources:
- The book Active Hope by Joanna Macy offers skillful ways to stay anchored in difficult conversations.
- Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman shares insight into purpose, growth and meaning.
- The Spiral of Active Hope Conversation Guide and Climate Wayfinding site share activities.
2. Investigate Your Options:Exploring career possibilities
Brainstorm career ideas: Use the SDGs as frameworks to help students discover careers and sectors aligned with their interests. The SDG Career Guide describes the work to be done in each area and can give some starting ideas of possible job titles.
Consider key skills: Identify how a student’s existing or developing skills could contribute to solving issues highlighted by a specific SDG. Check out the free Queen’s Skills Cards | Career Services for help with skills assessment.
Engage with research tools and strategies: LinkedIn Alumni Search, Career Cruising or My Career Journey can help students generate ideas and brainstorm possibilities.
Supportive resources:
- The Design Your Life prototyping exercise invites students to create plans based on their top 3-4 career ideas. Consider reading (or recommending) books like Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
- Look at resources like Project Drawdown for ideas about climate solutions, or other resources in the Next Steps section of the SDG Career Guide.
3. Focus and Plan:Encourage planning and taking action
- Imagine future impact: Invite students to imagine the kind of positive impact they want to make, then reverse engineer steps toward it.
- Get involved now: Suggest students connect with clubs, courses or initiatives that align with their goals. Check out resources like the Major Maps related to specific programs for additional ideas for getting involved.
- Get connected: Encourage students to find groups or professional associations related to their SDGs of interest. These share useful resources, opportunities, directories, events and more.
- Explore further education: Help students investigate related educational opportunities related to SDGs of interest.
- Set plans & goals: Support students to develop professional and career development plans and goals using resources like the MyMajorMap blank map.
- Some action is better than no action: Encourage students to engage in small experiments in living to learn about themselves and the world. They can start small to test the waters and build momentum toward larger actions and commitments. For example, they could try volunteering with a local charity or club on campus before changing their major or applying to a new graduate school program.
4. Communicate Your Value:Tell your story with impact
- Sense of mission: Invite students to consider how their values and important issues can help to form a personal mission statement for their career, helping keep them on track and motivated. For instance, “I want to use my [skills] to realize my [values] by creating [desired impact].”
- Powerful documents: When working on cover letters, LinkedIn profiles or grad school applications, encourage students to consider adding the sense of mission or impact they have had to convey their motivation.
- Energized conversations: In conversations like job interviews or networking information interviews, encourage students to consider presenting themself as someone with a clear focus and mission by talking about the impact they have had and want to have in the future.
Next steps
There are so many ways you can use the UN SDGs to support career development – the above ideas are just a starting point. Below, we’ve included a few fantastic resources that can help you go even further.
If you’ve got great ideas, please share them! Consider commenting below, writing your own articles or contributing to the conversation at CERIC’s upcoming Cannexus26 conference.
Additional resources:
- An Imperfect Guide to Career and Climate – Trevor Lehmann
- Climate Emotions Wheel | Climate Advocacy Lab
- Introducing: The Climate Adaptation Competency Framework – MACAL Program
- Challenge Cards | SparkPath
- The SDGs for career exploration and purpose – interview with Dr Candy Ho – Critical Perspectives on Career and Career Guidance (COCAG)
