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Tag: career exploration

  • At State Conference, Rubin Team Introduces Products to the Homeschool Community

    At State Conference, Rubin Team Introduces Products to the Homeschool Community

    For Rubin, this year is all about exploring new markets for our employability and career exploration products. June 2025 offered an ideal opportunity to say “Hello!” to the homeschool community.

    From June 5-7, members of the Rubin team attended the Home Educators Association of Virginia (HEAV) annual convention in the state capital of Richmond. At the HEAV convention, we spoke with dozens of home school parents and received positive feedback on our instructional materials. Over and again, homeschool parents told us “There are no current providers of career development resources in the homeschool community. But these skills are so needed.”

    We also engaged with national homeschool educational suppliers as we seek valuable partners who can share our products with families across the country.

    With any new audience segment, we need to find our place in unfamiliar territory. The first step is to get in the room, listen to the customers and find the right partners.

    Then the process will take shape organically.

    We look forward to serving the homeschool community and helping these students gain critical skills for college and career opportunities!

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    Rubin Director of Instruction Alexis Kruemcke explains our Aspire career exploration video library to a homeschool parent in the exhibit hall of the Home Educators Association of Virginia (HEAV) annual convention in Richmond. Rubin attended the HEAV convention from June 5-7, 2025 to make a formal introduction to the homeschool community and begin to assist families with employability skills training.

    New audience, new impact.

  • Rubin Partners with Miami-Dade, Nation’s 3rd Largest School District

    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.

  • Rubin Trains School Counselors in Las Vegas on Emerge, Aspire Products

    Rubin Trains School Counselors in Las Vegas on Emerge, Aspire Products

    Rubin is a leading provider of employability skills products for teachers, students andcounselors.

    During the week of March 24, 2025, the Rubin team led a series of virtual workshops with elementary school counselors in Clark County School District or CCSD (Las Vegas, NV) on our Emerge and Aspire products. Ashley Leon Ramirez, CCSD elementary counselor specialist, facilitated the workshops.

    Emerge is our signature employability skills curriculum, and Aspire is a growing library of career exploration videos. Both products are available in Canvas, the learning management system CCSD uses to provide instructional content to its more than 300,000 students.

    CCSD is the nation’s fifth largest school system.

    In the workshops, Rubin founder Danny Rubin and Director of Instruction Alexis Kruemcke directed 100+ counselors to locate Rubin Emerge and Aspire in Canvas. The Rubin team then demonstrated how to access a piece of Rubin content within Canvas without signing in traditionally.

    The counselors found value in topics like social media etiquette, email writing, resume help and interview prep.

    Live trainings (virtual or in-person) are a critical part of how Rubin delivers instructional materials to large districts like CCSD or smaller school divisions.

    Book a demo to see Emerge and Aspire in action, and discover why many of the nation’s largest districts choose Rubin for employability skills training.

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    In the image above, Rubin founder Danny Rubin leads a virtual training for elementary school counselors across Clark County School District (Las Vegas, NV), the nation’s fifth-largest school system. Clark County is a Rubin customer and employs our Emerge and Aspire products for employability skills training and career exploration, respectively.

    Fifth largest school district in the nation.

  • Here are the Finalists for America’s Next Great Intern!

    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

    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!

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    Click the box highlighted in red to launch the accessibility features from any page.

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    The new page mask feature.

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    Click on the icon circled in red to launch the accessibility portal for PDFs and Word docs.

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    A look inside the accessibility portal for a Rubin PDF about email etiquette.

    Rubin is for all learners.

  • Rubin Unveils Aspire, Career Exploration Platform with Focus on Employability Skills

    Rubin Unveils Aspire, Career Exploration Platform with Focus on Employability Skills

    Aspire, career exploration platform from Rubin

    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.