Test-Taking and Future-Making: How to Grow Career-Readiness Skills During Testing Season

Testing season can be more than a time of prep and assessments. It offers a meaningful opportunity to reflect on growth and progress along the path from classroom learning to future careers. When approached intentionally, this period offers a chance to help students both demonstrate what they’ve learned and deepen their global competencies—those essential career-readiness skills that power future success in work and life.

These competencies—curiosity, critical thinking, flexibility, and self-awareness, among others—are more than just nice-to-have traits. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, the most in-demand career skills include analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, and agility. These align directly with Participate Learning’s global competencies and are the foundation of the Global Leaders framework—a career-readiness solution that prepares students to thrive in an interconnected, ever-evolving economy.

So how can we cultivate these career-critical skills during testing season?

Check out the new career exploration resources we’ve created for teachers to use during testing season and beyond! Click here to jump to the resources. 

More Than a Test: Practicing Real-World Skills in Real Time

Testing season is a unique time to cultivate skills that students will carry into their future careers and global experiences. Testing season may bring stress, but it also gives students a chance to tap into and grow the skills that help them manage it—like flexibility, self-awareness, and critical thinking. By practicing these global competencies, students face testing with greater confidence and build the human intelligence skills essential for future career success.

Here are a few examples of how to grow these career-readiness skills during test preparation:

• Critical Thinking: Encourage students to analyze questions carefully, consider multiple solutions, and justify their reasoning. These same skills help students evaluate information and solve real-world problems.
• Flexibility: Tests often include unexpected challenges. Teaching students to adapt, reframe mistakes as learning opportunities, and manage uncertainty mirrors the resilience needed in today’s global workforce.
• Curiosity: Foster a questioning mindset. Help students see tests as a chance to demonstrate what they know and identify areas for further exploration, just as they would when tackling a real-world problem.
• Self-Awareness: Guide students in recognizing their own test-taking habits, managing stress, and setting personal goals—all lifelong learning strategies.

Ask your students how else they see the global competencies aligning with their responsibilities when testing and the strategies that they’ll use during this process!

Take Advantage of Testing Season’s Flexible Time for Meaningful Career Exploration

While global competencies like flexibility and self-awareness help students manage the pressures of testing season, career exploration plays a different but equally essential role in preparing students for their futures. Within the Global Leaders framework, career readiness is not just about having the right skills—it’s also about knowing how those skills show up in real-world careers. Career exploration helps students connect the dots between what they’re learning today and who they might become tomorrow.

Testing season often brings shifts in schedules and unstructured time. This makes it the perfect opportunity to engage students in purposeful, curiosity-driven career exploration activities that deepen their understanding of the working world and their place in it.

Ready-to-Use Career Exploration Resources

To support educators, we’ve curated a set of exciting new resources designed to make this kind of learning both engaging and easy to implement. These activities help students see career possibilities through the lens of their own interests, values, and the global competencies they’ve been building all year:

• Choose your movies with intention. Check out this list to explore some common classroom movies that spark conversations around leadership, innovation, and making a difference in the world.
• Read a book connected to career readiness. Select read-alouds, or fill your classroom library with some great choices from this collection that spotlight real-world roles and help students see careers that exist within and beyond their school walls.
• Invite a guest speaker to your school. Bring the community in to help students learn in a new and exciting way! Use this email template to welcome local professionals into your classroom and give students firsthand insight into the skills and mindsets needed in today’s workforce.

By using these simple resources during a naturally flexible time of year, you can make space for career exploration in a way that feels organic. These activities don’t have to be big or complicated to make a difference. Adding in a few reflective questions can turn a fun activity into a powerful learning moment. Consider questions such as how did the main character in this movie use curiosity to accomplish their goals? Or what skills or global competencies helped our guest speaker succeed in their career? 

When students have regular chances to think about how their interests and strengths connect to real careers, they begin to build confidence, motivation, and a clearer sense of what’s ahead. Career readiness is about more than preparing for the future—it’s about helping students see that they’re already on the path.

Testing Season as a Career-Readiness Accelerator

Testing season can be more than an academic checkpoint. It’s an opportunity to help students build resilience, problem-solving skills, and confidence, which extend beyond the classroom. By aligning test prep with the human intelligence skills and global competencies and embedding career exploration into flexible moments, schools can reshape a typically stressful season. This shift transforms testing season into a powerful opportunity to prepare students for a future that is collaborative, unpredictable, and full of possibilities.

How do you help students develop global competencies during testing season? Share your strategies with us using #GlobalLeaders, and join the conversation on how we can make test preparation more intentional, meaningful, and empowering for students everywhere.