National Careers Week

Putting careers in the curriculum

We’re half-way through National Careers Week already!

It seems like a good time for NUSTEM to shine a light on the resources we have for teachers to help them put careers in their curriculum, this week, and every week.

Primary resources

We’re really proud of our Primary Careers Tool – a database of over 100 jobs linked to primary science topics AND the attributes needed to succeed in that job.  Just choose a topic, choose a career, and ask your pupils ‘Would you do that job?’

All of our workshops are career-inspired and curriculum linked and often have ‘activities to try at home’.  Explore our resources to find simple practical activities you can use in your science lessons this week.  How about The Materials Scientist, or

If you work with young children, then we have lots of suggestions of STEM story books that you might like to have a read through.

We have recently developed our STEM Person of the Week resources.  This is a five week teacher-led activity which showcases a different STEM person each week. It helps teachers and pupils identify the attributes they share with the STEM people.  You can find out more information about SPotW, including how to get hold of the resources here.

Secondary resources

We’ve brought all our secondary career support together in one place here.

All secondary teachers are now expected to include ‘Careers in the Curriculum’ with the introduction of the Gatsby Benchmarks.  To help with this, we’ve developed a CPD session for science and maths departments.  If you’d like this delivered in your school, just email nustem@northumbria.ac.uk.

Our Director, Carol, has written a number of articles about careers for Education in Chemistry – though they are suitable reading for all science teachers: Including careers in the curriculum; How to tackle careers guidance; Why should you care about careers? and It’s time to talk careers.

Thanks to FutureMe funding, we have produced some revision question sheets for sciences and maths – all of which are linked to companies in the North East and beyond.  You can download the sheets from here. There are lots more of these sheets to come.

So hopefully that’s given you some food for thought for the rest of National Careers week. We’d love to hear what you’re doing to put careers in YOUR classroom.