Employer partnerships can be more than enrollment and tuition. Make them grow your partners’ expertise.
We guide your faculty to build work-generated learning into academic programs, every step of the way. Working students earn credit researching their employer's practices, and our Shared Practice Lab shows where your programs can increase value for partners.
Degrees and credentials only matter when employers trust what they mean. Higher education earns that trust when the expertise inside organizations becomes part of how students learn.
From credentialing gatekeeper to Partner in Practice
Higher education can be more valuable for working adults and their organizations by repositioning from the "center" of practice to a "partner" in practice.
Treating adult students as if they are preparing to enter a profession in the future.
Recognizing adult students who have already entered, are practicing their profession of choice, and held accountable within a community of practice.
Offering degree programs that can only promise long-term benefit without being able to guarantee it.
Offering an academic structure that helps students make sense of their employer organization and develop their own theory of practice — building real capability today, not just credentials for future promise.
Managing industry relationships to ensure a predictable flow of employees to enroll in degree programs.
Making direct contact with the knowledge and practices that drive industry organizations, and structuring degree programs to help students integrate deeper into it.
A student who belongs to two communities at once
The apprenticeship-based degree aligns the university with the employer rather than substituting for it — structuring an organization's learning so a new employee develops in both worlds simultaneously.
The workshop
Where they build real competence in the work — learning the practice by doing it, alongside those who already can. This is the expertise the university was never built to hold.
The academic community
Where they develop the capacity to research, reflect, and orient their work to a life and a society larger than the job. This is what only the university can do well.
The path emerges from the practice — it is not imposed on it. Alignment starts inside the employer, transforming how the organization holds knowledge, so it can run vibrant, emergent apprenticeships. Only then does that work articulate into a degree.
Alignment doesn't start with a new degree path
Most people get the order backward. The degree is the last step, not the first — it emerges only after the practice proves valuable to both the individual and the employer.
Architect learning access
We help the organization architect the conditions for how learning is accessed in practice, so it can run vibrant, emergent apprenticeships in the flow of real work.
Surface the value
As the apprenticeship matures, the Lab’s learning platform surfaces what the organization knows, enabling closer alignment between the employer and the institution.
Articulate into a degree
Once surfaced, the organizational knowledge can be articulated into an accredited, credit-bearing pathway with academic support needs analyzed.