Define and Align Readiness Metrics for Specific Education and Work Pathways

Learners need more specific guidance to prepare themselves for the career, college, or service path they choose. Leaders across higher education, industry, and service should work together to provide more specific measures of readiness for different paths to help learners understand the prerequisites necessary to be fully prepared to take their next steps. Furthermore, higher education admissions criteria and hiring requirements should be aligned to these readiness metrics so that learners can succeed in the next step in their journey if they reach the defined benchmarks. By collaborating, K-12, higher education, and workforce development can align more of their outcomes metrics and improve transparency and public access to information.

Montana’s Year-to-Career initiative is a powerful example of cross-sector collaboration addressing the needs of one of the country’s most rural states by developing common language and defining specific pathways from education to workforce and focusing on quality over quantity to meet local needs.1 Facilitated by Education Design Lab, the Montana Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education and Montana’s public two-year colleges have collaborated with employers, learners, and local stakeholders to codesign micropathways programs of stackable credentials earned in less than a year that can lead to an associate degree and immediate employment. Different colleges designed different pathways responsive to their local high-demand occupations, deepened their relationships with employers by moving from advisory to codesigner roles, and brought micropathways to a tribal college for the first time.2

Education leaders and policymakers should work together to clarify and close gaps in the reporting around transition points in learners’ journeys. Additional support could be provided by updating infrastructure to follow and assist learners through extended lifelong learning journeys, which will become more necessary and more complicated in a rapidly changing economy. State policymakers can contribute to these efforts by creating clear definitions of career, college, and service readiness, requiring a common set of outcomes and metrics, and aligning state plans and goals across systems.