As educators, we know there are multiple reasons why it’s important to get your work-based learning program right because these experiences provide for:
- Economic mobility and agility
- Increased school engagement and school attendance
- That clear sense of purpose and passion for their career
- The ability to realize their full potential
- The network into the professional community that is so critical in our world today
As part of AASA’s Redefining Ready! movement, it has been crystal clear that work-based learning experiences are critical to drive the economic engine for our youth, especially at-risk students. We must provide opportunities for our students in the K-12 setting to experience the workforce to determine what they do want to do with the rest of their lives, and more importantly, what they don’t want to do.
But first and foremost (especially for at-risk students), it is really about economic mobility. A systemic work-based learning program can guarantee that every individual student has the opportunity to understand their true potential for their future and to understand how to harness their natural skill sets.
One of the reasons we started Transeo was because of our frustration around the amount of time spent on paper and pencil tracking in today’s high school settings. And when we surveyed students, we found that 93% of these learning experiences were being tracked using paper or via some sort of spreadsheet online.
Work-based learning cannot scale on paper and spreadsheets because of these items:
- Makes it incredibly challenging and difficult to manage students
- Makes it even more challenging to manage business partners
- Takes so much more time and energy to manage
- Are prone to mistakes and errors
And all this takes you away from the value-add of the experience for the students. Software has advantages for all your stakeholders. The rest of this short article will focus on the benefits for students specifically.
Why We Developed Transeo Jobs (40 sec video)
Founder, Dave Schuler, summarizes why he founded Transeo to help educators and students
Seven Ways Work-Based Learning Software Increases Student Engagement
Gives Your Students Control of Their Journey
A software places your students in the driver’s seat of their career journey. It starts by allowing them to identify their career area of interest and see how that is connected to the actual coursework they’re taking in class. They’re also able to assess the career development activities that they’re engaged with and quickly match and access their classwork and interests to all the outside opportunities that are available to them.
Makes it Easy for Counselors and Adults to Support Their Individual Students
Counselors, student coaches, and mentors have controlled visibility into a student’s career development activities. This makes it easier to enhance opportunities and to recommend new opportunities to help them continue on their journey. Mentoring on a one-to-one basis is also easier.
Connects the Student to Their Community
A software encourages and allows a student to network into the local professional community. Students are able to learn the soft skills required to network with future employers and are able to practice these skills in a professional environment where the stakes are not as high because employers understand that growing these skills is part of the experience.
Faster Background Checks
Transeo Jobs automatically conducts and tracks background checks. This keeps students safe and makes onboarding partners faster.
Streamlined Management with Dashboards
All communications between the business partner and the student are tracked within the system with an easy way to verify the hours a student has worked. This eliminates the need for paper forms. Students will have clear, real-time visibility of where they are and what they need to do to complete both individual tasks and their program.
Automated Reporting
At the end of that experience, they’re also able to produce a transcript that records the work hours they have completed and all of the experiences that have led them up to graduation.
360-Degree View Empowers Students
When a student has engaged in their career journey, they’re graduating into a future and a career of choice, and not just a job.
Over the course of their workplace learning program students have actively made choices in both coursework and activities, which allows them to understand the journey that they are on and view their progress. The entire experience will help put them on a career path that they’re interested in.
This experience and 360-degree view creates some momentum and perspective of what they can become professionally – whether they start their careers they day after they graduate high school or go to college to continue to develop their skills.
How Work Based Learning Software Impacts All Stakeholders to Make Student Success Easier (Webcast)
In this educational webcast, Transeo Co-Founder and Award-Winning Superintendent, Dr. Dave Schuler, discusses best practices to scale a work-based learning program and how software makes it easier for all your stakeholders to scale a program. He also discusses how a Work-Based Learning Software Increases Student Engagement
About Transeo
Transeo is a suite of cloud-based educational solutions that helps students and staff connect to each other in a more effective way. We make community service tracking and internship reporting easy. We help schools and districts move away from paper-based processes so counselors, advisors, and administrators can invest more quality time with the people who matter the most: students.
Transeo Jobs helps students focus on becoming career ready by putting opportunities, classes, and experiences in one dashboard. We help schools keep track of complex information and complicated interactions in our user-friendly platform that manages key contacts and service providers.
To learn more about how Work-Based Learning Software Increases Student Engagement and helps you to scale your program visit the educational links below