What is a Worksite Tour? What is a Job Shadow?
This activity aims to define the purpose and value of a worksite tour and job shadow experiences.
Note to Instructors: Using connections from Lesson 1: Expanding Your Opportunities Through Networking the Activity 2 and 3 networking activity, you should be able to schedule a worksite tour and/or job shadow within the students’ interests for the purpose of this lesson. Here is a Work-Based Learning Checklist for Instructors with additional resources if needed. Ideally, the worksite tour and/or job shadow should be in the process of being scheduled before starting Activity 2 of this lesson. Knowing who they will be shadowing or where they are touring can help students tailor their questions more effectively.
Discuss
Worksite tours are scheduled visits to workplaces. These tours give you a firsthand look at how different jobs and industries work. These tours can include guided walkthroughs, demonstrations of the actual work, and chances to talk with employees to ask questions. This gives you a real-world look at what it’s like to work in a certain career or at a certain business.
A job shadow is like a worksite tour, but instead of observing a worksite, you are observing someone who works in a specific job or career. As the name implies, you are like that person’s shadow by watching what they do to better understand their responsibilities, tasks, and workplace.
Watch
Worksite Tours: Preparing For Your Visit (Video – 3min) and How to Job Shadow (Video – 4min)
A worksite tour or job shadow are typically with an employer or in a career you are interested in learning more about. This is another way to figure out if your career interest is something you may want or may not want to pursue. Either way, this information is helpful to you as you make career decisions.
Try these different prompting questions to help start the conversation:
- What do you think you might learn on a worksite tour or a job shadow?
- How could a worksite tour change your perspective on a job?
- What questions would you ask during a tour?
Discuss
Have you ever visited a workplace? This could be where a parent works, a field trip, or even somewhere in the community (e.g. a store, restaurant, community pool). [Note to Instructors: Facilitate a brief discussion to allow students to share their experiences.]
- What jobs did you notice?
- Were people working while sitting, standing, or moving around?
- Were people interacting or working alone?
How do you begin to decide where to reach out for a worksite tour or job shadow? It helps when you start thinking about your interests and skills. Combining your interests and skills helps guide you to jobs, careers or work environments that may be interesting to you. Let’s think back to when you were networking. Who on your My Network tool was someone you were interested in knowing more about their job or where they work?
Resource
Use the Worksite Tour and Job Shadowing Ideas to help you identify work site tours or job shadow ideas.
Click and Explore
If students need help coming up with ideas, help them navigate to Career OneStop. Here you can look up a job or interest along with your city. For example, if you search for ‘animal caretaker’ in your city, a page of information will come up, including a brief video to watch about that career.