By Eric Davis
Career coaching plus a scalable platform plus a regional ecosystem of employers, schools, and community partners: that is the unlock. And right now, Indiana is leading the way.
On April 29, 2026, more than 500 high school juniors and seniors from across the nine-county Greater Lafayette region walked into the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds and shook hands with hiring managers from Subaru, Wabash, Kirby Risk, IU Health, Caterpillar, and dozens of other employers.1 Some left with internships. Some left with their first jobs. All of them left with something harder to measure: a clearer picture of what their future could actually look like, in their own community.
It was the fourth annual HireME! career fair, hosted by Greater Lafayette Commerce in partnership with Career+ Pathways™ by Skyepack. And it was a quiet, concrete demonstration of an idea that’s about to reshape Indiana education: that the future of career connected learning is not a platform, and not a counselor, and not a workforce program, but all three, woven together at the regional level.
The diploma is changing. The expectations are changing too.
Indiana has spent the last several years redesigning what it means to graduate from high school. The new Indiana Diploma rule, finalized in December 2024, replaces the old credit-based model with a system of Diploma Seals in three tracks: Enrollment, Employment, and Enlistment, each with Honors and Honors Plus tiers.2
The seals are ambitious by design. The Employment Honors Plus seal asks students to complete 650 verified hours of work-based learning , earn an industry-recognized credential, and demonstrate communication and work-ethic skills verified by an actual employer. The Enrollment Honors Plus seal opens the door to automatic admission at all seven Indiana public universities. The Enlistment seals connect students directly to military and service pathways.
This is what real-world readiness looks like written into state policy. And it is, by any measure, a national first.
But policy alone doesn’t graduate students. Schools have to actually deliver these pathways. They have to track work-based learning hours per student. They have to coach individualized seal selection across six different tracks. They have to verify credentials, log work-based learning placements, and feed all of that data into a state reporting system. They have to do it for every student.
And they have to do it with counselor caseloads that often exceed an average of 357 students per counselor.
What the research says: platforms alone don’t work. Coaches alone don’t scale.
For two decades, schools across the country have tried to solve career navigation with software. Career Information Systems. College and career planning platforms. Aptitude assessments. Some of it works some of the time. Most of it sits in tabs that students never reopen.
The reason isn’t the technology. The reason is the implementation.
A 2025 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, looking at large-scale education technology rollouts, found that “computer-assisted learning platforms frequently underperform at scale not because the technology is ineffective, but because schools face substantial implementation frictions. Teachers and administrators must overcome initial technical hurdles, reorganize instructional routines, manage competing scheduling pressures, and do so while uncertain about the technology’s effectiveness.”3 When the researchers paired the same platforms with on-the-ground implementation support, weekly student usage rose from 7.2 minutes to 47.4 minutes, more than sixfold, and student achievement gained nearly half a standard deviation.
A 2026 RAND Europe Harnessing the Benefits of EdTech reached the same conclusion: “active engagement, not just access, drives impact… where engagement was low, or use was passive, there was little or no impact… Implementation fidelity emerged as another critical factor.”4
Translation: handing a school a platform and walking away doesn’t work. The schools that get results are the ones whose platforms come paired with people, including coaches, mentors, navigators, who are focused on helping students and actually using the tool to help make decisions about their lives.
HireME! is what the unlock looks like in practice.
That ecosystem is exactly what Greater Lafayette has built. Greater Lafayette Commerce, in partnership with regional schools, Ivy Tech, and Skyepack, has stitched together what the Commerce calls the Career+ ecosystem5: a coordinated regional approach where employers, educators, and students don’t just exist in the same county but actually work together on a continuous cycle of exposure, exploration, training, and placement.
HireME! is the most visible product of that work. It’s grown every year since launch. The 2026 edition pulled high schoolers from Attica, Central Catholic, Clinton Central, Faith Christian, Frontier, Harrison, Jefferson, McCutcheon, Oakland Academy, Seeger, Tri-County, Twin Lakes, and West Lafayette high schools, among others. Employers represented advanced manufacturing, healthcare, finance, construction, hospitality, technology, and more.
For the first time, in 2026, the event also opened a public session, connecting the same employers with adult job seekers from across the region during the afternoon hours, after the student session closed.6
Eric Davis, CEO of Skyepack, put it this way at the event:
Kara Webb, Director of Workforce Development at Greater Lafayette Commerce, added: “A single conversation with an employer can open the door to an internship, a first job or a career path someone may have never considered before.”7
That’s what HireME! is operationally. But what it represents is something bigger: the live demonstration of a model the rest of Indiana is now being asked to scale.
Why this model works: three things working together.
1. A scalable platform that captures the journey
Career+ Pathways™ is built on Skyepack’s digital learning platform, which gives every student a continuous record that travels with them from middle school through graduation and into postsecondary or employer placement. The platform isn’t a single tool. It’s a connected suite designed around the way Indiana students actually need to engage with seal pathways:
- A microcredential curriculum that delivers career awareness, exploration, and skill-building content, integrated with classroom instruction.
- The Career+™ Locally Created Pathway, a seal-aligned graduation pathway built in partnership with each region’s schools and employers, gives students a clear, credit-bearing route to earning their Indiana Diploma Seal.
- A work-based and experiential learning marketplace that surfaces real-world opportunities, including internships, apprenticeships, job shadows, employer projects, and matches them to student interests and pathway goals.
- A career profile for every student that tracks coaching encounters, credentials, work-based learning hours, and pathway progress, and evolves over time as the student’s interests develop.
The result is that every coaching conversation, employer encounter, credential earned, and hour worked is captured in one place. Without that infrastructure, schools end up tracking 650 work-based learning hours per student in spreadsheets, paper folders, or most often, not at all.
2. Career coaches in schools: managed, trained, and accountable for results
Schools don’t just need coaches. They need coaches who actually deliver outcomes. That distinction, between staffing and managed services, is what separates an integrated model from a delivered-and-forgotten one.
Skyepack directly hires, trains, and manages every career coach placed in a partner school. Coaches go through structured training on the Career+™ Platform and regional labor market information so they’re as fluent in the technology as they are in pathway counseling. Their performance is tracked weekly against student outcomes, including seal progress, work-based learning placements made, credentials in progress, barriers identified, and barriers overcome. They aren’t splitting their time across crisis response, scheduling, and an approximately 350 to 1 counseling caseload. Their only job, and the only thing they’re measured on, is moving students forward on a seal pathway.
That weekly accountability loop is the part most observers miss. A school counselor with a 350-student caseload, however excellent, cannot dedicate the time required to track 75 – 650 work-based learning hours per student. A contract coach without a management layer behind them isn’t measured on whether students actually earn seals. A Skypack-managed coach, embedded in the school but rated each week by the provider on student progress, is the only model where someone is unambiguously accountable for the result. That accountability is the integrated approach. Without it, you have software and a job title. With it, you have outcomes.
3. A regional ecosystem of employers, educators, and community partners
The third leg is the one most often missed in policy conversations. A coach is only as effective as the network of opportunities the coach can connect students to. Greater Lafayette Commerce isn’t just a chamber. It’s the convening organization for a nine-county talent ecosystem, with employer relationships across manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and beyond. When a coach knows that Subaru is hiring this quarter for a specific role and that the credential pathway runs through Ivy Tech, students aren’t getting generic career advice. They’re getting actionable, locally relevant guidance from someone with current, on-the-ground knowledge.
Greater Lafayette is where this model started, but it’s no longer where it ends. Career+ Pathways™ now powers six regional Career Coaching and Navigation grant coalitions across Indiana , expanding from 18 partner schools to more than 130, and from roughly 35,000 students to well over 200,000.8 Together, these coalitions support nearly one-third of all school corporations in the state . Alongside Greater Lafayette Commerce, the regional partners now include the Region 4 Department of Workforce Development and the Wabash Valley Education Service Center , with Wilson Education Service Center, Northern Indiana Education Service Center, Northwestern Indiana Education Service Center, West Central Indiana Education Service Center, Adams Wells Manufacturing Alliance and the Center of Workforce Innovations coming online through the current grant cycle.
The model is replicable because the components are modular: the platform is the same everywhere; the coaches are managed and rated against the same outcomes; the regional partners adapt to the specific employers, credentials, and opportunities in their communities. What works in advanced manufacturing in Tippecanoe County looks different from what works in healthcare in the Wabash Valley, but the operational backbone underneath is the same.
That backbone is producing outcomes that go well beyond traditional internships. Across regions, partners are deploying employer-led skills bootcamps aligned to workforce demand, student-run school-based enterprises that give students real operational experience, and co-designed virtual micro-internships that remove transportation and geographic barriers, opening work-based learning to students whose home districts couldn’t otherwise host the experience. Every hour, every credential, every competency lands in the same connected system, giving regions real-time visibility into what’s working and where to scale next.
Behind every regional rollout is a layer of dedicated success managers : distinct roles supporting the three groups of stakeholders the ecosystem depends on. Employer success managers ensure local businesses have a clear path to engage students for work-based learning, hire from the pipeline, and track outcomes. Intermediary success managers help regional partners, including chambers of commerce, workforce boards, economic development organizations, operationalize their role in the ecosystem. School success managers work directly with district leadership, principals, and counseling teams to ensure the platform, the coach, and the curriculum are landing the way they should. The point is that nobody in the ecosystem is left to figure it out alone.
Indiana is leading. The question is what comes next.
What Indiana has done with the new diploma seal framework is genuinely ambitious. The state has chosen, deliberately, to tie graduation to real-world readiness in a way no other state has. That is a leadership position worth defending.
But the seals are a destination, not a delivery mechanism. The state’s ability to actually graduate students with Honors Plus seals, and to honor the automatic-admission commitment to seven public universities that comes with the Enrollment Honors Plus seal, depends on every Indiana school having access to the same kind of integrated coaching, platform, and regional ecosystem that Greater Lafayette has spent four years building.
Most don’t, yet.
That’s where the next chapter of policy work comes in. Indiana’s Career Coaching Grant Fund — the appropriation that pays for dedicated career coaches in schools — is up for reauthorization in the 2027 legislative session. The 2027 budget is the moment to turn “we have a great diploma framework on paper” into “we have a great diploma framework that’s delivering results in every corner of Indiana.”
The model already exists, and it’s already scaling. What began taking shape in Greater Lafayette has grown into a statewide effort, with partner schools, employers, and coaches building the same connective tissue in communities from Gary to Evansville, from Fort Wayne to Bloomington. HireME!-style events are the most visible piece, but the engine underneath — the coaches, the platform, the employer partnerships, the school relationships, the credential pathways — is the part that’s proving replicable. And it’s ready to reach every student in the state.
For Skyepack, that’s the work. For Greater Lafayette Commerce and the growing network of partners across Indiana, that’s the work. And between now and the spring of 2027, the General Assembly has a remarkable opportunity: to lock in the investment that lets Indiana’s new diploma seals become the framework the rest of the country looks to — the model other states study, adopt, and follow.
The unlock is real. The model exists. It’s working today — in fairgrounds and gyms and event centers across Indiana, full of handshakes and hiring managers and high school juniors discovering, for the first time, that their future is right here in their own community.
Now it’s about scaling what’s already proven.
Connect with us!
REFERENCES
- Indiana Chamber of Commerce, HireME! Expands to Welcome Public and Connect Students, Job Seekers with Local Employers (March 30, 2026).
- Indiana State Board of Education, 511 IAC 6-7.2-20 and 511 IAC 6-7.2-21 (LSA Document #24-220), approved December 2024, effective July 1, 2025.
- Oreopoulos, P., Keyes-Krysakowski, M., & Agarwal, A. (2026). NBER Working Paper No. 34683. National Bureau of Economic Research.
- RAND Europe, Harnessing the Benefits of EdTech: What Research Tells Us About Using Digital Technology to Support Pupils (Jan 5, 2026).
- Greater Lafayette Commerce, Career+ Ecosystem. greaterlafayettecommerce.com/greater-lafayette-career
- Star City TV, Greater Lafayette Commerce HireMe career fair opens to public (April 2026).
- Clinton County Daily News: https://clintoncountydailynews.com/more-than-500-students-expected-at-hireme-career-fair-april-29/
- Eric Elming, Scaling Career Coaching at Statewide Speed: How Skyepack Is Powering Indiana’s Work-Based Learning Future, Skyepack (February 3, 2026).
