Step 2: Educate

Noted below are programmatic features that we would like teams to incorporate when developing their innovative solutions for the Adult Career Pathway Design Challenge.

• Focus on occupations and careers that are growing, emerging, and offer meaningful employment with family sustaining wages, in alignment with labor market information that workforce agencies publish for your state or locality.
• Access to postsecondary education or training experience and corresponding credentials.
• Where appropriate or applicable, opportunity to attain secondary education credentials for adults who lack those credentials upon entry into the program but possess the required skills to pass high school equivalency assessments or tests.
• Work-based learning opportunities in real work or virtual/simulated contexts.
• Academic and wrap-around support services to support the target student population, including career advisement, planning and placement services.

And, we encourage teams to consider other additional features, including but not limited to:

• Technology (e.g. new products, services or solutions) to customize and accelerate skill development, including embedded personalized remedial instruction;
• Stacked and aggregated learning experiences at various levels of education and industry credentials;
• Expedited credential attainment through recognition of prior learning assessments as well as use of competency-based assessments and micro-credentials; and
• Emphasis on adult populations that face the most significant barriers to access, persistence, completion, and competitive employment (e.g. homeless, veterans, persons with physical disabilities, immigrants/English language learners, incarcerated individuals, etc.)

Review our Resources & Support section for helpful publications and links.