A couple of years ago I met Diane Miller, MiSTEM Business, Community, & Education Liaison, at the Michigan Career Education Conference. She shared with me that the MiSTEM Network had been using data from AtoZdatabases, an eResource in the Michigan eLibrary (MeL), to build a story map where students with interests in a specific industry could go to learn about internships, apprenticeships, and jobs in their region of the state. Diane and I reconnected a few weeks ago, and I asked about the project. A lot has happened in two years!

The MiSTEM Network’s Greater West Michigan Region has successfully completed the pilot and is now scaling the project up to the entire state. Through a partnership with Grand Valley State University, faculty serve as data coaches and undergrad students participate in internships learning valuable skills like team building, communication, problem solving, and critical thinking that help to prepare them as they enter the workforce.

The goal of the Career Exploration StoryMap is to help educators and students make more real-world career connections in their communities as well as provide a visual resource for students to locate businesses in STEM fields that offer high-wage and high-demand jobs. In addition to items such as apprenticeships and internships, the map can be viewed by individual industry clusters like agriculture, construction, energy, finance, healthcare, IT, manufacturing, and transportation. Although the map is very user friendly, the website does include directions.

The MiSTEM StoryMap aggregates data available from AtoZdatabases in MeL and uses it to build a tool that will help students and adult community members quickly filter, sort, and analyze data in STEM industries by county. Essentially, the interactive map answers the following questions:

• Where are the businesses in my community?
• What industry has the most growth?
• What are the hot jobs in my area?
• What growth do businesses project?

The information presented not only communicates the physical locations of business partners and industry clusters in Michigan, but it also helps students identify trends, patterns and opportunities to make better career decisions, which aligns with the guidelines in the Michigan Career Development Model. The MiSTEM StoryMap can also assist adults in preparingor higher education, credentialing, and the workforce.

Whether it’s genealogy research, test preparation, accessing eBooks, finding the perfect article, or the ability to aggregate data, the eResources in MeL provide much support to all Michiganders.