Kickstart Your Career

New AP Career Kickstart Classes Launch

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

The Advanced Placement (AP) Career Kickstart courses have been set by College Board to officially begin in the 2026-2027 school year. AP Career Kickstart is a new category of AP classes designed to give school students a “kickstart” on their path to employment by providing technical knowledge on high demand careers. These classes give employer-endorsed career credentials as well as college credit to students with a high AP exam score.

The first two AP classes to be released in the AP Career Kickstart category are AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity. Upper school social studies teacher Stephanie Amidon is thrilled to have the opportunity to teach AP Business this fall.

“I am excited about bringing something new to the school,” Amidon said. “We have never really had anything like this before.”

Maclay Upper School computer science teacher Joe Kupiszewski has piloted AP Cybersecurity for the past two years, meaning that College Board selected Maclay for its testing phase of the class prior to it being finalized and released nationwide. Next year, students will have the opportunity to take an official AP Cybersecurity class, which is becoming more important than ever as careers in computer science continue to grow.

“With the advent of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity in general, as well as a field of study, will become even more important,” Kupiszewski said.