Whether an institution refers to work-based learning (WBL) initiatives as Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs, Innovation Centers, Trade Programs or any other alias, the number of these programs are on the rise as schools push to support their students through the transition into college or the workforce. As more schools strive to build a successful CTE program, they discover the large number of intricacies that go into successfully guiding partners and students through the process, curriculum, and requirements. In an effort to ensure students are college or career ready and are on the right post-secondary path, most states will be boosting their high school graduation requirements to include work-based learning credits.
On top of balancing the nuances and changing regulations of these complex programs, we’re finding that school districts are turning to manual processes because the capabilities of existing technology simply aren’t adequate. Existing K-12 student information systems focus solely on traditional coursework. On top of that, district IT teams are stretched thin supporting district-wide software as well as individual schools, leaving minimal to no time to build out new solutions for work-based learning.
Salesforce’s Education Cloud for K-12 has the ability to streamline a school’s entire work-based learning program from finding, vetting and onboarding partners to tracking detailed time of student efforts and generating automated reports. Below we’ve called out a few key areas supported by implementing the Salesforce solution for your work-based learning program:
Transparent Partner Management
Partner relationships can quickly become siloed to the person who owns the relationships which can make managing the partner’s status and movement through the program difficult for program facilitators. This one-off style of managing key relationships can lead to more spreadsheets or dispersed data, missed or incorrect communication, two people working on the same tasks, etc.
Salesforce can become a centralized partner database to create a 360 degree view that provides not only partner details and insight to communication, but the ability to track overall interaction with your partner from applications, scheduling, emails, program participation, and more. Once you’re actively managing partners and their participation in the program, you can start to focus on improving the partner experience and your ability to source new partner opportunities.
Tracking Students Through Their Pathway Towards College or a Career
Beyond managing your industry partner data, Salesforce can also be used to track students through their career and technical education path. Similar to partners, we often find that the student data that you need to manage your work based learning programs are often not managed in a centralized database, resulting in cumbersome processes and multiple systems to get all of the information they need to serve their students.
Salesforce can be used to track a student’s involvement in work based learning programs and events, as well as help track any certifications that they’ve earned. We’ve also helped our clients integrate their key student information system data into Salesforce so that it can be viewed alongside the work based learning information that is being tracked in Salesforce.
Metrics & Accountability Provide Real Time Data
The data that’s derived from your program’s participants should help you define the ongoing strategy of the program, as well as what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Salesforce also alleviates concerns around work-based learning compliance by helping your team digitize, automate and manage partner contracts, background checks, permission slips, and easily pull data for compliance reporting activities.
How Salesforce Can Help Make It All Happen
Below are just a few of the ways that you can use standard Salesforce functionality in order to enable your school district to manage your work based learning program:
At Elevation Solutions, we have immense experience transforming district-wide work-based learning initiatives into fully functioning and scalable programs that do exactly what they are intended to do, give students the confidence to successfully graduate and move into careers. We’re happy to talk and share more about how our team and Salesforce can help! Email booking@elevations.solutions or fill out our Getting Started Form.
