It's not only young Career Trek participants taking big steps forward - the program itself has made major strides.

Career Trek launched a pilot project in 2004 at Arborgate School in La Broquerie, Manitoba, that has students exploring careers as part of their classroom curriculum.

Arborgate Teacher Derek Gordon says introducing his Grade 5 and 6 rural students - many of whom come from farming families - to opportunities they may not have known about can make a huge difference.

"We have a lot of low-income families and this is an attempt to break the cycle of poverty in our community and show the students all the options that are available to them," Derek says.

Trekkers at the kindergarten to Grade 8 school (located 40 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg) tackle careers relevant to their unit of study.

During math class, they become pollsters, asking questions of their schoolmates and then graphing the results. When discussing simple machines in science class, they become bike mechanics.

Derek says it's important to reach kids early - while still in middle school - so they have a good idea of their career interests before they have to choose their high school classes.

"We find that when students are getting to the end of Grade 8 and have to select courses for high school, they are usually not informed as to what courses they should be taking in terms of their future plans," Derek says. "It's something we're really trying to get them to think about in the middle years."

He says without any career education, they choose "blindly" and potentially make the wrong choices for Grade 9, which has a domino effect in subsequent grades.

"They really need to be planning before they get to high school," says Derek, who would like to see Career Trek one day be part of school curriculum province-wide.