The Learning and Employment Record | Inside Higher Ed

Many  of our regular University of Venus readers know about our companion podcast – View from Venus that highlights the work of amazing women in higher ed/higher ed adjacent spaces. A few of you probably know of Rocking the Academy – my collaborative podcast project with Roopika Risam. 

I also have a third podcast – ExperiencED – another collaborative project – this time with my longtime colleague Dr. Jim Stellar at SUNY Albany and speech pathologist, Adrienne Dooley. 

The ExperiencED podcast focuses on the world of experiential education which is fitting since the three of us were at Northeastern University at the same time where we were fully immersed in the world of cooperative learning as Dean of Arts and Sciences, faculty member and PhD student, and undergraduate student. 

We just launched season 4 of the ExperiencED podcast and we opened with a fascinating conversation with Rick Torres, CEO and President of the National Student Clearinghouse.

If you are interested in work-based learning, credit for on the job learning, the idea of a career and college portfolio that follows you throughout your work/learning life, give it a listen or read the transcript. Jim is generous with the podcast notes so you could start there to see if you are interested in more. 

I don’t often write about experiential education at UVenus but it is one of those areas where I have a strong interest. Over fifteen years of my time in higher ed was spent at Northeastern and I am still in partnership with many faculty and staff at the university. (It helps that I live less than a mile from the campus and cross through it to get to Boston University.) When you work at Northeastern, you are immersed in the world of experiential education – from coop to service learning to study abroad. It is woven into the development of courses, majors, and degrees. It is a constant in the undergraduate classroom. If the professor doesn’t bring it up, the students are almost always referencing their coop work – bringing practice and theory together in really exciting ways. Working there provided me with an experiential education lens through which I now view the world of work and learning/career and college. 

I want to briefly mention two other projects I’m working on that are related to experiential ed and that I will be writing about in the coming weeks: first, I serve as an advisor in the American Council on Education’s Learner Success Lab which brings a 21st century holistic approach to rethinking career services, academic advising, and student success and second, when I was in Boston’s City Hall serving as Chief of Policy and Planning, I worked with Bob Schwartz at the Project on Workforce at Harvard to launch a working group focused on implementing recommendations from a landscape analysis of Boston Career & College Pathways. We’ve formed a partnership to bring together higher ed, employers, K-12, youth-serving nonprofits, and the city of Boston to work together to support our young people. I’ll be writing about both of these projects over the coming months so stay tuned. 

Back to the National Student Clearinghouse work, which I find really exciting for a number of reasons. As background, the National Student Clearinghouse is a partner to 3,600 colleges and universities and 17,000 high schools, helping to track the journeys of learners throughout their educational careers.  More recently, the NSC has become involved with the Learning and Employment Record (LER). The LER  documents skills related to both career and college. 

In our podcast episode, Rick talked about the importance of this next stage of learning documentation that includes work experience. This builds a record that brings work and learning experiences together and a skills framework that can be utilized with transitions from school to work, and even back to school. With this comes the recognition that skills are not just learned within the academy but also in on-the-job training, apprenticeships, and other work-based learning experiences. A single record like this would assist employers in finding talented employees, crucial in our time of shortages. It would also help K-12 and college students envision their future career opportunities. Ideally, we would find ways to document prior learning in ways that gives our students credit toward college credentials – certificates and degrees. 

I love this idea and I have also heard about moves to create a space for high school students in LinkedIn so they can begin to document both their classroom and work-based learning and showcase their skills. In reading Dean Dad’s blog post this morning on a national army of career counselors, I couldn’t help but envision a career counselor/guidance counselor who followed students from 7th grade to post-graduate. Clearly, this is not an individual but a system. If we think creatively and holistically about the Learning and Employment Record, can it be a resource for that system of guidance and counseling?

Mary Churchill is the former chief of policy and planning for Mayor Kim Janey in the city of Boston and current associate dean for strategic initiatives and community engagement at Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University. She is co-author of When Colleges Close: Leading in a Time of Crisis and an ICF certified leadership coach.