The Kansas Career Sunflower: Career Guidance for Students
The Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) Kansas Career Sunflower is used in school districts to encourage career exploration. The sunflower helps students discover different occupation possibilities based on interests and skills.
With recent updates to the model, we reached out to Natalie Clark, assistant director on the Career, Standards and Assessment Services team at KSDE, to shed some light on how the Kansas Career Sunflower has evolved.
What Is the Kansas Career Sunflower?
Before diving into the updates, let’s review how the Kansas Career Sunflower works. The visual model is designed to help educators and students explore career pathways. It organizes career information into industries, clusters and pathways, helping students understand the connections between their interests, skills and potential careers.
The model is structured across the following three key educational stages.
- Elementary: The model introduces students to career awareness through seven key industries:
- Agriculture
- Business
- Design, production and repair
- Family and consumer sciences
- Health
- Media and technology
- Public services
- Middle School: The model expands into 16 career clusters to help encourage career exploration. Career clusters include:
- Agriculture, food and natural resources
- Architecture and construction
- Arts, AV technology and communications
- Business management and administration
- Education and training
- Engineering
- Finance
- Government and public administration
- Health and biosciences
- Hospitality and tourism
- Human services
- Information technology
- Law, public safety and security
- Manufacturing
- Marketing
- Transportation
- High School: The model offers 32 pathways, guiding students as they start to specialize in career preparation. Pathways range from animal science to digital media or restaurant and event management.
At the center of the Kansas Career Sunflower is an emphasis on workplace skills, applied knowledge and effective relationships — all essential for employability. For a more in-depth view of the pathways, you can view the 2024-2025 sunflower model here. Note: The updated sunflower model will have 15 career clusters and 32 pathways compared to the 16 career clusters and 36 pathways in the 2024-2025 model.
What’s New in the Sunflower Model?
KSDE released the new modernized sunflower model at the annual K-ACTE Summer Conference.
“The update reflects the sunflower’s new infinity sunflower design,” said Clark. “The infinity shape symbolizes the idea of transferable skills, showing that students can move fluidly between different industries as they uncover what best aligns with their strengths and interests.”
In addition, Clark explained that the new icons were chosen to represent the industries, and the colors were maintained as closely as possible to the career clusters in the previous model.
For some context, this is what the old version looked like.
And here is a view of the new sunflower model.
Career Education Resources
When asked about additional resources, Clark recommended several that are available to help in career guidance and navigation for students, including:
Parents curious about how to support students in career exploration can check out this blog post, which features communication tips and dives into the previous version of the Kansas Career Sunflower.
