Curriculum-to-Career Innovations Institute

This Institute is designed to make authentic connections within and across disciplines to link curricular learning with students’ sense of purpose in pursuing workforce preparedness and vocational exploration. Whether leveraging the unique possibilities within general education and/or the majors, this institute brings teams of faculty and staff together to build a holistic experience that levels of the playing field for future success in navigating a rapidly changing economy.

Throughout the Institute, campus teams benefit from expert insights from both higher education and industry leaders to develop curricular-based designs focused on topics like: work-integrated learning, fostering students’ sense of agency and purpose, and creating shared learning goals across academic units, career centers, and student affairs.

The Institute’s approach to innovation emphasizes:

• design thinking
• broad and inclusive interdisciplinary perspectives
• collaboration across stakeholders
• systemic commitments to equity

This unique Institute will engage campus teams in design and mentoring opportunities across a full semester. Additional design and development sessions, along with on-going mentoring, will occur after the semester. Participating teams will play a key role in shaping Institute sessions over the semester.

Institute Goals

Participating campuses will advance their campus efforts to more effectively link students’ learning with career preparedness through:

• Gaining strategies for developing mutually beneficial campus/industry partnerships
• Advancing problem-based, applied learning and teaching practices across disciplines aligned with workforce skills
• Articulating student achievement of skills through innovative credentialing frameworks (e.g. micro-credentials, badging, certificates, ePortfolios)
• Honing high-impact practices with a focus on career applications (e.g. micro-internships)
• Building more robust cross campus partnerships to support curricular innovations and faculty collaboration

Who Should Attend?

The Curriculum-to-Career Innovations Institute is designed for any campus across all sectors of higher education that wants to more intentionally link student learning with career preparedness. Attendees can be at any stage in the process of developing their curriculum to career project. Teams should include a diverse set of colleagues, including a senior academic officer, faculty, and campus educators beyond academic affairs who play vital roles in advancing students’ learning and career development (e.g., career center directors and student affairs professionals).