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Tag: career exploration
Here are the Finalists for America’s Next Great Intern!
The Rubin team is excited to announce the 2025 finalists for our America’s Next Great Intern contest.
In the annual contest, students showcase employability skills that employers nationwide value in new hires.
Rubin, the leader in online resources for employability skills training, hosts the competition.
The contest is 100% free. All participating students receive a certificate of completion and a ready-made portfolio of their submitted contest materials. The first place winner (high school division) will meet virtually with Scott Kaufman-Ross, an executive with the National Basketball Association (NBA).
The free contest is open to middle school, high school and postsecondary students in any CTE or project-based (hands-on) class or program.
Students were asked to submit examples of their work in the following categories:
- Email Etiquette: Demonstrate a professional-grade email based on fictional, work-related scenario.
- Research and Critical Thinking: Learn to develop sharp questions ahead of a fictitious internship interview.
- Ethical Dilemma: Provide a response to a tricky ethical situation you might face as an intern.
Demand for intern and job applicants with “soft skills” is a top priority across all industry sectors. According to a 2022 survey of employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), 76% of respondents want to hire young people who can work on a team, 73% want ones with strong written communication skills and 58% seek new hires who can speak well.
“Employers often lament that students don’t possess the ‘soft skills’ necessary to engage in an office setting or on the job site,” says Danny Rubin, founder of Rubin. “We hope the contest shows that, yes, there are motivated young people coast to coast who will add value to any business or organization.”
Voting is now open! Visit rubineducation.com/vote to pick America’s Next Great Intern.
Here are the 2025 finalists!
- Kainat Ahmadzai, 10th Grade
Prince William County Schools (VA)
- Kris Basa, 12th Grade
Nacogdoches ISD (TX)
- Jordan Blair, 12th Grade
Anoka-Hennepin School District (MN)
- Ailey Bolson, 12th Grade
Oconomowoc Area School District (WI)
- Rakshana Damodaran, 9th Grade
Fairfax County Public Schools (VA)
- Da’moni Gosha, 10th Grade
Phenix County Schools (AL)
- Asher Hoffman, 11th Grade
Laguna Beach USD (CA)
- Shannon Jenkins, 12th Grade
Boone Community School District (IA)
- Anvith Narayana, 9th Grade
Wake County Public School System (NC)
- Jocelyn Osborne, 12th Grade
Botetourt County Public Schools (VA)
- David Sheffield, 12th Grade
Montgomery ISD (TX)
- Sofia Tovar, 12th Grade
Allen Village School (MO)
- Eliana Wehrle, 11th Grade
Clark County School District (NV)
See who made the cut!
Rubin Enhances Accessibility Features for Emerge and Aspire Products
In both our Emerge employability skills curriculum and Aspire career exploration video platform, we added new accessibility features. Teacher now have:
- 7 different American voices for text-to-speech
- “Page mask” to highlight lines while darkening the rest of the page
- The ability to read aloud and highlight text on a PDF or Word doc
See screenshots below and then dive into Emerge or Aspire to try these exciting features!
Click the box highlighted in red to launch the accessibility features from any page.
The new page mask feature.
Click on the icon circled in red to launch the accessibility portal for PDFs and Word docs.
A look inside the accessibility portal for a Rubin PDF about email etiquette.Rubin is for all learners.
Rubin Partners with Miami Dade, Nation’s 3rd Largest School District
Rubin Partners with Miami Dade, Nation’s 3rd Largest School District
In the photo: Rubin founder Danny Rubin (left) stands with Miami-Dade students and their teacher Shnae Wallace. The students use Rubin’s Emerge employability skills curriculum to help with email etiquette, job interview prep and more.
Rubin, the leader in online curriculum for employability skills, has partnered with Miami-Dade County Public Schools to provide high school students with lessons that focus on college and career readiness.
Miami-Dade, one of the largest school divisions in the country, has a robust internship program that sends thousands of high school students into the South Florida business community each spring.
In the 23-24 academic year, Rubin products proved themselves as supplemental curriculum for the internship program. During the classroom portion of the internship program, 3,000 Miami-Dade students spent more than 250,000 minutes in Rubin’s Emerge employability skills curriculum on topics like resume writing, email etiquette and job interview prep.
In the 25-26 academic year, Rubin has expanded further into Miami-Dade through career-based pathways like health science, business and agriculture. Rubin will also now provide its Aspire career exploration video platform and Propel email etiquette teaching tool.
All Rubin products integrate to Schoology, Miami-Dade’s learning management system, via LTI 1.3. That means students and teachers access Rubin content in Schoology seamlessly and without a traditional sign-in process.
“We are honored to work with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, one of the nation’s leading school districts,” said Danny Rubin, founder of Rubin. “Already we have made an impact on several thousand students, and we’re excited at the chance to make a deeper impression in the school years to come.”
We reach South Florida.
April 29, 2025: TV News Anchor
Special guest: NBC News Correspondent Kathy Park and KSLA News 12 (Shreveport, LA) Anchor Domonique Benn
April 9, 2025: Dietitian
Special guest: S. Skylar Griggs, registered dietician and owner of Newbury Street Nutrition
March 26, 2025: Plumber
Special guest: Daniel Clayburn, plumber and owner of X-Act Plumbing in Texas
Rubin Unveils Aspire, Career Exploration Platform with Focus on Employability Skills
It began as live webinars through Zoom.
Nearly two years after the Rubin Dream Job Series (formerly Virtual Internship Series) launched in Zoom, the Rubin team has amassed 50+ conversations with professionals across fields like STEM, health care, marketing, sports, law and more. See all recordings here.
What makes the Dream Job webinars unique is that we focus on the nature of the job (ex: sports agent) and the importance of employability skills on the job (ex: how to engage with clients and coworkers).
Through a survey of teachers who regularly attend our webinars, one dominant theme surfaced. The webinars are excellent for career exploration, the teachers said, but the recordings (45 minutes, on average) are too long to replay in class.
Enter: Aspire.
We heard the feedback loud and clear, and we have delivered on it. Introducing Aspire, Rubin’s new career exploration library, available as an integrated, single sign-on resource for your LMS.
We took the full-length Dream Job conversations and identified four clips (2-3 minutes in length) from each one that we believe are the most essential moments from the broader interview.
Sample Aspire video from our conversation with a lab technician:
Across our 50+ Dream Job conversations, we hand-selected more than 200 videos clips and support each clip with a set of discussion questions (over 500 discussion questions available).
The result is a comprehensive archive that features “best of” moments from top professionals along with classroom materials to bring the conversations to life with your students. Each job (ex: E.R. nurse) comes with a certificate to allow students to show completion and an understanding of the job.
“Aspire is a resource we didn’t know we were building all along,” said Alexis Kruemcke, an implementation specialist at Rubin and the project lead for Aspire. “We had already spoken live with so many business professionals and, from that content, we created high-quality, on-demand videos in 5, 10 and 15-minute time windows.”
Aspire is available as modules in Canvas, folders in Schoology, a series of links in a Google Doc and any other way you need to pull the exploration videos in.
What’s more, the Rubin team plans to add 1-2 new occupations each month at the conclusion of every new, free Dream Job webinar hosted in Zoom.
“As soon as we conclude the Dream Job webinar, we will pluck out the top moments and add them to the Aspire library,” said Kruemcke. “Aspire will continue to grow and feature unique and innovative jobs across the CTE landscape.”
Aspire is priced as a site or district-license tool. It’s appropriate for grades K-12, and the videos feature sign language and closed captions.
Free trials of Aspire are available. Email Chelsea Caputo, national sales manager, at chelsea@rubineducation.com to schedule the trial and see Aspire for yourself!
A resource whose time has come.