By Bailey Grams
At Career+ Pathways™, creating positive experiences for our students, teachers, and employer partners is a top priority. This is why we are constantly reviewing our materials, platform, and offerings to ensure that they provide the best service to the people who use them most. In order to provide the best possible services, it is important to hear directly from the people we serve.
Our programs are successful because we listen to the voices of those who use them. Between our teachers, counselors, admin, students, and organization partners, there are many different ways to use our programs and we do our best to account for every perspective. Career+™ Pathways™ is always open to new thoughts and ideas on how to make our products and programs more effective for every user. As part of this mission, we enlisted the help of teachers, counselors, and admin from across our community of schools to share their thoughts and feedback in a summer fellowship.
2025 Career+™ Summer Fellowship
At the end of the 2024-2025 school year, we knew that we needed the minds of our users to guarantee that our programs were providing a genuine benefit and that they were continuing to only get better and better each year. Just before the lure of summer captured our school partners, we sent out the call, and twelve dedicated educators answered.
From June through the start of August, these educators–a mix of microcredential teachers, counselors, and school administrators–offered their time, knowledge, and years of practical experience to our development team in an effort to find even more ways that the Career+ Pathways™ platform, programs, and curriculum could benefit the students at their schools.
Every week,we gave this cohort of reviewers a piece of the Career+ Pathways™ puzzle to explore and offer feedback. They reviewed new and returning features such as the:
- Career+™ Microcredential courses
- Work-based learning tracking feature
- Virtual chats and tours
- Career+™ training for new school members
- Experience scheduling feature
At the end of each week, the cohort met in a 30 minute Zoom call where they discussed their thoughts and were able to brainstorm together. This group bounced ideas off each other, learned from one another, and combined their perspectives to make constructive suggestions and provide invaluable insights. By bringing together people from all facets of the school system and from multiple different school districts across the state, this cohort developed even stronger ideas that apply to all users, no matter where they live..
These meetings kickstarted a rapid review process as our team worked to enhance our offerings and get them ready for use at the start of the 2025-2026 school year. Our team synthesized the comments, ideas, and suggestions we received, made a plan, and began implementing the changes our dedicated cohort of reviewers suggested. We believe that this process has helped us create products for both staff members and students that are better than ever and will provide even more benefits across all of the communities that we serve in Indiana.
Other Stakeholders
Throughout the summer, our team also worked closely with our organizational partners to find new ways we can offer value to them as they continue to volunteer their time, space, and knowledge to their communities through our program. At individual meetings with each organizational partner, we heard their feedback on and history working with our programs and learned the needs they have as an organization. With this information, our team has brainstormed new exciting features that we can develop to create even richer connections between our organization partners and the future workforce.
Thanks to this collaboration, we started development of new features that show our organizational partners more granular data on the impact they make on students and the interest they spark in the community. We are also creating new ways to highlight their job openings and experience offerings so that students who show interest in different careers can more easily find opportunities that suit them best!
As always, Career+ Pathways™ has a mission to bridge the gap between the students getting ready to enter the workforce and the organizations who have a place for them. We are excited to watch that gap grow smaller and smaller as our services continue to evolve year after year to match the changing needs of the state.
We Are Grateful
We are very grateful to have had the assistance of our Summer Fellowship cohort these past few months. These dedicated men and women carved out the time in their summer vacation to get their hands in the clay and have their voices heard. We appreciate all that they have done to shape not only what our program looks like this year, but in the years to come. We hope to do justice to their belief in this program and know that their efforts will help us provide even better career-connected learning, support for graduation requirements, and educational benefits for students all across Indiana.
Bio
Bailey Grams is a senior instructional designer and an employer engagement specialist with Career+ Pathways™. She has a background in English and communication studies and has been working with Skyepack as an instructional designer for over five years. She has also studied graphic design and uses that knowledge to help guide her development of new materials for students and teachers. Outside of work, she can be found reading for her book club, learning a new craft, or playing board games with friends.
