Tech May Be the Future of Career Pathway Navigation, but Partnerships Are Timeless

In 2021, CAEL was awarded a U.S. Department of Education Grant to lead the development of a personalized digital career-exploration platform. CAEL piloted the three-year project in six regions: Prince George's County, Maryland; Central Indiana; Rhode Island; Racine, Wisconsin; Maricopa County, Arizona; and southwestern Ohio. Regional partners, with the support of national partners, tested the platform, known as Exponential Pathways, or XP, exploring different approaches to helping high school students and other young adults make informed decisions about navigating complex educational and career options. Their input not only guided the platform's development but contributed to valuable insight about the intersection of emerging technology and time-tested principles. By assessing the differences and similarities among the regional pilot experiences, CAEL identified recommendations that would help high schools, nonprofit organizations, local governments, and other stakeholders undertake similar efforts with greater efficiency

Career Pathways--Prosperous Progressions of Education, Training, and Employment Opportunities 

The career pathways concept is at the heart of CAEL's mission to link learning and work. To develop effective, transparent, and navigable career pathways, CAEL continually convenes key partners from all corners of the workforce ecosystem, including employers, trainers, and educators. Their interaction ensures work-relevant, hands-on learning that supports individual worker/learner success while driving broad economic development by meeting critical talent pipeline needs. 

CAEL's legacy career pathways work would be foundational to XP's forward-looking scope. At the same time, CAEL used the pilot experiences to evaluate the potential of technology solutions for accelerating the career pathways model and improving its efficiency and effectiveness. The XP platform aimed to offer a personalized, user-friendly career exploration experience that could deliver a seamless exchange of real-time educational, occupational, and other data among a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders. This array of stakeholders includes high schools, employers, counselors, teachers, job training organizations, and postsecondary education institutions. 

Disparate Regions, Unified Design

CAEL initially provided a minimally viable version of the platform to each pilot region, encouraging a collaborative and incremental design process. The platform rapidly evolved as it incorporated feedback from the regional participants. Design elements focused on maximizing customization and flexibility so the platform could deliver tailored experiences that integrated local education, training, and job market opportunities and demands. To accomplish this, the platform added a localized skills assessment tool, a robust skills registry, and a virtual mentorship component that allowed users to hear from "real life" local peers with similar backgrounds who had succeeded in areas aligned with the students' aspirations.

As the project advanced, CAEL consulted with key national and local partners not only to determine the most effective strategies to engage local stakeholders and resources, but to integrate them within the platform. For example, XP incorporated existing mentoring and volunteer initiatives to foster more tangible and meaningful connections within the workforce ecosystem.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Within six months of the grant award, the platform was nationally accessible at no cost to users. Through rigorous testing, insightful feedback, and user data, CAEL continually refined the platform to better align it with the needs and expectations of diverse users. By the end of the project, it included more than 50 regional and national partners. Nearly 2,000 high school students engaged with XP. Their active participation was instrumental in showcasing the profound potential of technology to enhance the navigation of rewarding education-employment pathways. Collaboration strengthened by multiple user perspectives highlighted key takeaways that will help inform future efforts to leverage technology to make education-employment pathways more accessible, effective, and navigable. 

Partnerships Ultimately Determine Potential

The XP pilot programs demonstrated that, even in the midst of a tech-heavy initiative, establishing the right mix of partners remains the most important success factor in forging career pathway solutions. Technology is clearly a critical piece of the puzzle, but overlooking partnerships risks condemning career navigation platforms to the "garbage in, garbage out" fate associated with any programming scheme. Selecting partners who are well-suited for the work and willing to engage actively is vital to achieving a viable resource. 

Collaboration Can Entail a Co-Learning Curve

Most of the pilot partners had never built a platform from scratch. While the objective of the pilot was to increase access to career navigation platforms, unfamiliarity added a degree of difficulty to the learning curve, including how to provide the feedback needed to drive a continually improving product. Moreover, participation prompted some pilot partners to discover and investigate similar platforms in their region. To give pilot partners more runway to succeed, CAEL recommends avoiding regions in which similar platforms have not been leveraged to their full potential or otherwise been ineffective.

Some partners also needed significant help with data collection. In fact, the task of gathering, populating, and rigorously testing content was more arduous than they had anticipated, although all cited the effectiveness of using localized data to create customized and relatable experiences for users. While identifying and collecting key performance indicators are critical for any project, maintaining these priorities faces unique challenges within the secondary education environment given safety and security measures that regulate interaction with high school students online. These experiences highlight the importance of preparing partners to design and run pilot programs and capturing opportunities to simplify processes. Improving technologies for automating how authentic, regionalized content can be gathered would be a key enhancement to similar future initiatives. Outside support for gathering and testing content, especially for resource-constrained nonprofits, high schools, and colleges, would also add value.

Diverse Users Mean Diverse Use Cases 

CAEL observed significant differences in how users from various backgrounds engaged with the XP platform. For example, younger student users, typically those in high school or early college, were strongly inclined to explore a wide range of options on the platform. They frequently took interactive quizzes and actively engaged with virtual mentor profiles to enhance their learning experience. On the other hand, older student users, especially those with workforce experience, tended to focus on specific learning outcomes related to predefined career goals over exploratory features. In one region, a site lead encountered communication barriers when working to help English language learners participate in the XP platform. These distinctions highlight the importance of tailoring technology to meet the diverse needs and preferences of a user base.

Helping Administrators Also Helps Users

Administrators were eager to understand more about how students engaged with the platform. They indicated that greater insight in this area allows them to better grasp students' evolving interests and help guide their academic journeys. They expressed the desire for additional features to allow teachers and administrators to gain deeper insights into student engagement with the platform. For example, one partner that features mentoring in several of its own programs was especially intrigued by the potential of enhanced data on how student users engage with virtual mentors and how the interactions enrich the learning experience.

A Look Ahead

The course of the three-year pilot program was marked by unexpected but enriching paths, leading to collaboration with various partners that sometimes took unexpected turns. Rather than viewing such shifts as limiting, the CAEL team embraced them as opportunities to evolve and enhance their capacity to serve an array of stakeholders, each with unique missions and perspectives yet united by a commitment to connecting students to navigable and rewarding career pathways.

This evolution broadened CAEL's understanding, experience, and expertise, allowing it to uncover a rich tapestry of use cases that it might not have encountered otherwise. As CAEL engaged with each partner, it witnessed firsthand how they innovatively leveraged the XP platform within their local communities. These interactions amplified the reach and effectiveness of individual and collective efforts and highlighted the transformative impact of tailored solutions. Ultimately, this collaborative journey has deepened and justified CAEL's commitment to creating meaningful change, driven by the diverse strengths and insights of each partner it has had the privilege to work alongside.