As adult educators, helping students prepare for or advance in their careers and education has always been part of our work. Taking a program-wide approach to this work can strengthen program efficiency and effectiveness, creating the conditions for better student outcomes and workplace success.
The goal of a program-wide approach is to help students recognize, practice, and talk about essential workforce skills, so they can contextualize and apply these skills in academic and career contexts beyond our programs. Alongside core academic competencies and traditional career exploration and job search skills (such as resume prep and networking), this includes foundational workforce skills that help students succeed in any career path.
To support programs in this work, this resource page includes a collection of tools and resources from SABES and our partners that programs can use to build their own approach.
- Building a Program-Wide Approach to Workforce Skills Topic Overview (Word Document) provides an overview of a program-wide approach, including the program areas where this work can be most impactful, short examples of program-wide approaches, and lessons learned that can inform planning.
- Building a Program-Wide Approach to Workforce Skills Program Examples and Program Profiles offer more in-depth examples of how four programs are approaching this work.
- Building a Program-Wide Approach to Workforce Action Plan Template (Word Document) is a tool that programs can use to develop their own approach.
Workforce Skills Frameworks
Several frameworks exist to help programs name and define workforce skills, including:
- Employability Skills Framework
- Teaching Skills that Matter
- MN ATLAS Transitions Integration Framework
Further Reading and Resources
- Inspiring Career Development & Action: a curriculum guide for integrating workforce skills that demonstrates how to contextualize these competencies alongside standard academic and career readiness content
- SABES Newsletter: Building Workforce Skills Across Adult Education: featuring several articles on strategies for integrating workforce skills across multiple facets of programming
- Advising Scope and Sequence Examples: a holistic approach to teaching core academic and workforce skills
- The Change Agent: “Re-training Ourselves, Re-Making Our Work: We All Have Transferable Skills”: featuring student stories and perspectives, plus corresponding exercises to help build skill awareness
Training and Technical Assistance
SABES offers training and individualized support that programs can integrate into their action plan or to support implementation.
- Program Design and Practices and Data and Measurement: Continuous Improvement Planning supports program leaders and teams as they use data to develop a collaborative goal and action plan. Programs can choose between a course, community of practice, and individualized coaching based on their needs and capacity.
- Curriculum and Instruction: Inspiring Career Development and Action: Strategies for Teachers and Advisors uses the Inspiring Career Development and Action Curriculum Guide to help teachers, advisors, and program teams strengthen their approach to integrating standards and contextualizing instruction with career exploration content.
- Advising: Building an Advising Curriculum provides strategies, tools, and resources to help advisors and program teams build or improve their advising program’s curriculum, framework, or scope and sequence.
- SABES Coaching Hub: Did you know that SABES offers program-based coaching? Use the Coaching Hub to learn about and request coaching on this topic or others.
Please reach out to Alexandra Papagno at alexandra.papagno@jsi.org with any questions about these resources or requests for additional support.
