Technical Assistance that Empowers Community Colleges to Redesign Career Pathways for Young Adult Workers

WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility is partnering with the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement to transform how community colleges design career pathways in high-demand fields. The resulting pathways will serve as a model for preparing workers to transition from unstable, low-paid jobs to family-sustaining work.

The Challenge

In many parts of the US, the most common jobs are often split between low-wage positions that require little education and more highly paid bachelor’s degree occupations. Therefore, young adults who go to work immediately after high school often become trapped in low-wage, unstable service jobs. Because most college programs are not designed for working adults, young adults are left to balance work, school, and family obligations; determine how to access education that prepares them for a high-demand, good paying job; and translate their skills from education to the workforce all on their own.

How We’re Taking Action

WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility and the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement (NCII) are working with eight community colleges from across the country to redesign career pathways. Over the course of four years, the Center and NCII will support colleges to develop, expand, or improve multiple career pathways that are found in all regional labor markets, including education, healthcare, and first-line supervisors. Because well-paid jobs in these fields require different levels of education, pathways will span certificate, associate’s degree, and bachelor’s degree programs.

As a first step, colleges will work closely with employers to transform curriculum sequences, course scheduling, and student support practices. Then, colleges will launch their refined pathways and collectively serve 1,200-1,600 students across two cohorts. The colleges can then apply what they learned to adapt other pathways from specific low-wage jobs to better paid opportunities.

To support participating colleges, WestEd and NCII are offering intensive technical assistance to colleges as they design and implement their refined pathways. Support includes customized labor market analysis, virtual and in-person coaching from experts, in-person working sessions to collaborative within and across college teams, topic webinars and cross-campus consultation sessions, and a student survey to capture employment and earnings outcomes.

The Back on Track initiative is designed to result in:

  • Improved and expanded workforce-aligned educational programs with clear on/off-ramps
  • increased postsecondary enrollment
  • higher rates of persistence, completion, and transfer
  • better post-credential employment, including higher earnings, working full-time, and more predicable hours

Beyond the impact on participating community colleges and the students they serve, Back on Track is also designed to produce field-tested models for career pathways in high-demand fields that can be replicated at other institutions. In consultation with participating colleges, the Center and NCII will produce toolkits relevant to each pathway to disseminate initiative learnings nationally.

This project will help us better serve people who are working but trapped in unstable, low-wage employment. Working with employers, we will identify opportunities for professional growth so our graduates can be more successful.

Jason Wood Vice President of Salt Lake Technical College

What Makes Us Different

Making labor market information (LMI) actionable: Overwhelming amounts of information, unfamiliar crosswalks, and data limitations create challenges in interpreting and acting upon LMI. We offer customized information that combines both descriptive and predictive information to support educators. By scaffolding information, we enable educations to make meaning of LMI in their contexts, challenge assumptions about the workforce, and explore the information can inform not just career services, but also student recruitment, advising, and curriculum.

Remaining worker- and student-centered: Understanding the perspectives of prospective and current students is critical to career pathway design. By engaging with new perspectives and incorporating tools like empathy interviewing and student personas into our work, we offer tangible strategies to ensure that analyses, strategic planning, and implementation incorporates the realities of students. By doing so, we help practitioners better understand the problems they are working to solve and design more effective solutions.

Taking a systems-change approach: Rather than focusing on pilot projects, we believe that impact depends on changes in policies and practices, relationships and networks, and mental models. We leverage data, student-centered design practices, employer engagement strategies, collaborative action planning, and expert coaching to support educators to take new approaches to tackle entrenched problems. By doing so, we build the capacity of practitioners to implement sustainable change that can be scaled across the institution.