Welcome to the Ponder Program

Teach career management skills across your entire school from Year 6 to 12

The Ponder Program makes it easy for you to deliver best-practice career education lessons in 2025. Find out more below.

Your complete careers program, all ready to go

Like to update your careers curriculum but don’t have 6 months’ worth of spare time to design, write, and create one?

Ponder solves that for you, with easy-to-use career education resources that teach students to know themselves, their context, and how they might fit in the world of work. Hear how Career Advisors Wanda Hayes and Lauren Soden use (and love) the Ponder Program at Sunshine Coast Grammar School –

Careers lessons (done the easy way)

Ponder not just gives you a complete careers curriculum, it also easily fits into almost any setting. If you can get 10 minutes with students, you can teach them valuable career management skills.

58 flexible lessons

Have the resources to teach career skills every week of the year across all year levels

From just 10 mins

Lessons easily slot into Careers Lessons, add value to PDHPE/PSHE/HASS lessons, or non-curriculum time like Home Room, Form Class, Tutor Time

Delivered by anyone

Lessons can be delivered by you or your teaching staff (easy-to-follow instructions and notes included)

We even provide slides, videos, teacher prompts, and student activities for every lesson, so your students can have positive conversations about a wide range of career management topics – making them better prepared for their future.

What does the Ponder Program teach?

The Ponder Program covers four (4) key learning areas that teachers can cover in lessons to help your students make a successful post-school transition.

Module 1

Understanding Self

First, students are supported to explore their strengths and learn about their priorities. In primary school this may mean exploring favourite subjects, while senior students work on building learner profiles.

Module 2

Self in Context

In Module 2, they start to see themselves in relation to their environment. This includes learning about appropriate workplace behaviour, finding balance, and managing conflict.

Module 3

Exploration

Module 3 is where we explore the labour market at a local, national, and global level, and at the same time students learn how to find meaningful work.

Module 4

Connection

Finally, in Module 4 we bring everything together so that students can begin to set goals and make plans that relate to their understanding of themselves and the world of work.

Here are just some of the 100+ Ponder Program lesson videos

Students LOVE watching video content, which is why every Ponder lesson has a career-practitioner designed video in it. Check out a few of them below –

Lessons are based on The Three Phase Inquiry Model

Learning career management skills requires more than just ‘rote memorisation’. Career education should be exciting and engaging, which is why we use a Three Phase Inquiry Model to structure each unit.

It’s simple, effective (and your students will always want more).

Discover

Students are introduced to the topic and given a chance to learn about the concept before going further

Discuss

Once students and teachers have watched the Discovery video, they can discuss their thoughts and ideas

Demonstrate

Encourage deep learning and reflection with the activities and thinking points which accompany each unit

Run it as your entire careers program, or use it to supplement your own

Ponder is perfect for schools where:

No career education structure exists
Your current program/lesson content isn’t working
You need access to modern videos, lesson plans, and activities

With fresh new content updates each year, it’s a program your school can fully utilise across all upper-middle and secondary school levels to build your students’ career management skills.

Hear how Careers Advisor, Terence Priester from Newington College uses Ponder:

Flexibility to suit any timetable (even yours)

Have weekly lessons? Use these to supplement your own.

Infrequent lessons or schedules? Perfect. You can easily pick and choose from the sequence.

Particular focus area? Choose a lesson that suits your age cohort, career education topic, or timing.

Each lesson can be as little as 10 mins or extended to 50 mins depending on your available time and depth of discussion. The length and mode of delivery remains entirely up to you.

Designed to be high-value, low-cost

Great career education is critical to life in our developed world, so whether you’re at a well funded school, or one where just the basics are covered, you’ll be able to budget for Ponder.

You and your entire school will get:

Access to the Ponder Career Education Framework (CDF)
58 units of engaging lesson materials including videos, slides, Student activities, printable posters, conversation starters and more
Online Rationales you can show your team to help them be clear on the theory, research, and intent so they know the ‘how & why’ of what is being taught

And all for one affordable price per year.

Teach best-practice in your school

It's Industry Commended

The Ponder Program was one of the first Career Education frameworks & materials in Australia to be independently review and awarded the prestigious ‘Commended Program’ status by the Career Development Association of Australia (CDAA).

The assessment criteria of Content, Credibility, Originality, Usefulness, Currency, Value, and Accessibility that Ponder met or exceeded means that you can purchase the Ponder Program with confidence.

Based on best-practice

Ponder is aligned with the world's leading career education frameworks

The Ponder Program works wherever you are, because it uses best-practice career education concepts from –

Australia
UK
New Zealand
Canada
USA

What that gives you is one holistic career education program that’s applicable and ready to teach in any English-speaking educational setting.

Can Ponder work in my educational setting?

(The short answer is YES)

Ponder is now being used in hundreds of secondary schools across Australia, the UK, and New Zealand with great success.

Government/Public Schools/Colleges
Private Schools
Religious Schools
Independent Schools
Large Metro Schools & Tiny Regional Schools

And it works well in every context because it’s so flexible.

Only teach careers in Year 9? Or Seniors? Or all grades?
That’s totally ok – choose from the program as you need to

Missed a week?
No problem, it’s not sequential or co-dependent

Want to pick and choose lessons?
Totally fine, you know your cohort and needs better than we do

All of the hard work is done for you, so you can just pick it up and start teaching. How will you use it at your school?

Who is Study Work Grow?

We're a student-focused, school-funded Social Enterprise

If you haven’t heard of us, that’s totally ok.

Study Work Grow has been quietly growing in popularity with Australian educators since 2018 and now more than 1-in-5 Australian secondary school careers advisors use our paid programs (and several hundred more access our free resources).

As a social enterprise, we reinvest our profits into making better program materials and resources for you, while keeping costs affordable.

Study Work Grow:

Is funded by schools
Is data security approved by each State & Territory
Is GDPR Compliant for UK Schools
Doesn’t sell data to third parties (ever)
Has an in-house (and very friendly) support team

All of the good things you need in an education provider.

We’re also Members of the top industry organisations for Career Education:

Schools love using Ponder

Educators love how we help them to have thriving career education programs in their schools – and we hope you’ll soon be letting us know how much you love our programs too.

I have already been given Mondays during home room for Ponder. I get 5 mins – a great way for students to start the week in 2023. I just love the video and the one question for discussion – just brilliant.

Juliana Dignam, Leader of Learning Careers, St Edward's College

Thanks for the email and document [Ponder Resource PDF]. I love that it is all together and makes it so straight forward when working with other staff who can feel out of their depth when asked to do something not in their "subject area".

Naomi Gill Careers Counsellor & Pathway Specialist, Carrol College Broulee & Trinity Catholic College

Something special for you with Essentials

Don't miss out on your Ponder Pack

Twice a year, we send out packs full of posters, guides, and other goodies (including TimTams) to our Ponder Program members.

Each pack has our favourite education materials from the year, helping you to reinforce the Ponder Program message in your school by making Careers visible.

The latest Ponder Pack is worth nearly $200 and will be sent at no additional cost to all Essentials Members (so it’s well worth joining before the 14 February cut-off just for this).

Start your Essentials Membership at school today

Here’s a quick recap of what’s included:

Essentials

Career Education Programs + Communication Tools

Full 12 months access to our quality, evidence-based career education programs co-designed with schools, including:

The Ponder Program for teaching career management competencies (worth over $2,000)
Ready-to-Work prepares students for their first job (sold separately for $550)
AweHunters Careers-in-the-Curriculum Program (worth over $750)
The Career Clusters gives students a great place to start conversations (other psychometric tests are often $50 per student)

Plus, you’ll get everything in our Lite Membership:

Custom School Careers Website
10+ Student Guides
200+ Job Spotlights
Researched Weekly News

All up, it’s over $3,000 worth of resources and endless time savings for you at a school-friendly price.

Get started today >>