Michigan's career standard, criterion by criterion: 6 of 9 matched, 3 not claimed.

Michigan compels a middle-grades career plan by law. Michigan compels this twice over, from two different directions, and both are worth quoting because a district will be asked about both. The curriculum duty is MCL 380.1166a, the Brian Whiston career pathways law: "Beginning in the 2019-2020 school year, the board of a school district or board of directors of a public school academy shall ensure that the school district's or public school academy's curriculum incorporates grade-appropriate instruction on career development in each grade level in grades K to 12." The same section is what produced the model this page tables — it directed the department to "develop or adopt, and make available to schools, a model program of instruction in career development" that "Defines learning targets and themes for each grade level", which is what the Michigan Career Development Model and its targets are. The document duty is MCL 380.1278b(11): "The board of a school district or board of directors of a public school academy shall provide the opportunity for each pupil to develop an educational development plan during grade 7, and shall ensure that each pupil reviews his or her educational development plan during grade 8 and revises it as appropriate before he or she begins high school." Two constraints in that same subsection bear directly on what a vendor can and cannot close. The plan "must be developed, reviewed, and revised by the pupil under the supervision of the pupil's school counselor or another designee qualified to act in a counseling role under section 1233 or 1233a selected by the school principal" — so the supervision is a named, certificated human by statute, not a workflow. And it "must be based on high school readiness scores and a career pathways program or similar career exploration program", which is the opening a career-exploration platform fills: we can be that programme, we cannot be that counsellor.

Michigan Career Development Targets — the "Middle School – Career Exploration" band, marked ⚖ Legislatively Required, together with the three things MCL 380.1278b(11) requires a pupil be provided while their Educational Development Plan is developed and reviewed., published by Michigan Department of Education (Michigan Career Development Model) and the Michigan Legislature (Revised School Code, Act 451 of 1976), grades 6-8. Michigan is the only state on this list whose middle-school obligation is split across two documents, and reading either one alone gives the wrong answer. The Michigan Career Development Model sets six targets for the middle-school band and marks that whole band ⚖ Legislatively Required — but the targets are programme outcomes written for a district, not criteria written for a student. The specifics sit in statute: MCL 380.1278b(11) is the Educational Development Plan provision, it lands in grades 7 and 8, and it enumerates three things a pupil must be provided while the plan is developed and reviewed. We table both, in two groups, nine criteria in total. What we deliberately do not table is the rest of §1278b, which is the Michigan Merit Curriculum — credit requirements for high school graduation, nothing to do with a middle-school career programme. The second source is at legislature.mi.gov/Laws/MCL?objectName=mcl-380-1278b. Two groups because there are two instruments. "MCDM-MS" holds the six Michigan Career Development Model targets for the middle-school band, each with the state's own number and its own short name — Career Clusters, Academic Connections, Career Exploration, Family Engagement, Career Interests, Career Planning. "1278b(11)" holds the three lettered paragraphs of the EDP statute, (a) through (c). We stop the second group at the three letters rather than decomposing the long lead sentence of subsection (11) into criteria of our own: the lead sentence carries real duties — grade 7 development, grade 8 review, counsellor supervision, a basis in readiness scores and a career exploration programme — but the state numbers none of them, and inventing six sub-codes for one paragraph would put our structure on a page that claims to show Michigan's. Those duties are quoted in full above instead.

It means the platform itself produces the artefact the criterion asks for, with nothing a teacher has to add. 2 criteria of the 9 are closed this way: MCDM-MS Target 5 and 1278b(11)(b). Each of those rows names the surface and the artefact, and several carry a coverage caveat — how many careers actually hold the field being claimed — because a reviewer will check.

It means the platform supplies the data or the assessment result and a teacher runs the classroom half — it is weaker, and it is labelled separately for that reason. 4 criteria are closed this way: MCDM-MS Target 3, MCDM-MS Target 6, 1278b(11)(a) and 1278b(11)(c). A plan a system wrote for the student would not satisfy the standard, and claiming it would not be worth much either.

Because the 2 and the 4 are different kinds of evidence — one is work the software does on its own, the other is work a teacher does with something the software supplies — and merging them into one headline number would flatter the platform at your expense. Every row states which of the two it is, and the counts are shown as separate pills rather than added together.

We make no claim on them. No JobCannon surface — assessment, career-page field or glossary entry — addresses them, and they are listed exactly as plainly as the 6 we do claim: same row format, same visual weight, a stated "not claimed" rather than an absence.

Both halves of the code column are the state's own numbering, and both can be cited back. "MCDM-MS Target 1" is the Michigan Career Development Model's own label for the first middle-school target, and "1278b(11)(a)" is the statutory paragraph exactly as the Revised School Code prints it. The one thing that is ours is the group prefix "MCDM-MS": the targets document numbers its targets 1 to 6 within each band and restarts the numbering in the next band, so "Target 1" alone is ambiguous across the five bands and we prefix it with the band to make it quotable.

The Michigan Career Development Targets PDF read 2026-09-06, published 18 December 2024 per the document's own timestamp; MCL 380.1166a as added by 2018 PA 229, effective 25 September 2018; MCL 380.1278b as last amended by 2022 PA 105, effective 29 March 2023. One access note that matters for anyone re-checking this page: michigan.gov and legislature.mi.gov both sit behind a web application firewall that returns 403 to a plain command-line fetch. That is a perimeter block on the tool, not a dead link — both documents load normally in a browser, and we read them through a read-through proxy to confirm the text quoted here. The document itself is linked at the top of the table, so you can check any row against the source rather than take our word for it.