Tens of thousands of middle- and high-schoolers in Maryland are getting ideas about what their future could be — ideas that might not have occurred to them a few years ago. The same part of the state’s K-12 education reform effort--the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future -- that requires students be “college or career -ready” by tenth grade, calls for each student to get individualized career counseling.

We hear from two advocates for workforce counseling: Democratic Sen. Cory McCray, representing Dist. 45, and a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the product of an apprenticeship. And from Kirkland Murray, president and CEO of the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Association, and president of the statewide association of workforce boards.

Then we get an idea of what the counseling entails in a conversation with Noah, a senior at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, and with Brady Wheeler, senior program manager of the Baltimore Career Coach Initiative, a program in the Mayor's Office of Employment Development.