The purpose of this toolkit is to compile resources for workforce development systems to use when developing their sector-based strategies.

The purpose of this toolkit is to provide helpful steps and resources to start and register an apprenticeship program.

This guide helps state education agency (SEA) staff develop and implement a career pathways system in collaboration with other stakeholders in the state.

This strategy-based toolkit aims to help leaders at community colleges develop relationships and partnerships with industry.

This guide assists school districts with many facets of the career pathways as a technical assistance initiative.

The Planner assists State leaders in visioning a local career pathways system.

This toolkit supports collaboration between employers, community-based organizations, intermediaries, and other organizations to support youth in advancing on their path towards a career.

The purpose of this toolkit is guide State and local leaders to build, implement, and sustain career pathways systems and programs. The 2016 revision includes new knowledge gained from the field, plus the system’s guiding legislation from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

The purpose of this toolkit is to educate employers and career/technical and adult education providers on the importance of building employer-educator partnerships. These partnerships can help educators target their programs to local employment needs, and they can help employers ensure there is a supply of skilled workers available to fill vacant positions.

This toolkit was developed to offer insight and suggestions on strengthening existing regional workforce funder collaboratives, as well as information on creating new collaboratives.  The toolkit has information on:

• The overall purpose and power of regional workforce funder collaboratives;
• The strength of sector initiatives and the role that the collaboratives play in strengthening these initiatives;
• Practical tips on starting, sustaining, evaluating, and growing a funder collaborative; and,
• Tips on how established collaboratives can change direction.

The toolkit is designed to provide local adult education programs with the tools required to assist students successfully transition from adult basic education (ABE) programs to secondary education and/or the labor market. The information in the toolkit helps adult education providers to gauge local labor markets and shape their programs to prepare students for real opportunities. 

Student Success Centers organize a State’s community colleges around common action to accelerate their efforts to improve student persistence and completion. One of the goals of a Center is to bring synergy between education programs and student success initiatives, such as Career Pathways. The toolkit is designed to reduce the learning curve and accelerate the time by which new Student Success Centers launch their operations. 

Student Success Centers organize a State’s community colleges around common action to accelerate their efforts to improve student persistence and completion. One of the goals of a Center is to bring synergy between education programs and student success initiatives, such as Career Pathways. The toolkit is designed to reduce the learning curve and accelerate the time by which new Student Success Centers launch their operations. 

This toolkit collects information about the supportive policies in place in states involved in the Pathways to Prosperity Network, that are receiving technical assistance in setting up grades 9-14 pathways systems. Relevant policy elements and strategies are catalogued with the aim of developing a policy set that can be used to implement Career Pathways programs in additional states. 

The Alliance for Quality Career Pathways (the Alliance/AQCP) developed this framework to help State and local partnerships strengthen their existing Career Pathways systems or build new ones. This toolkit was developed to be used in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Career Pathways Toolkit: Six Key Elements for Success – in the words of the authors, “the Six Key Elements help partners build systems, and the AQCP framework helps partners check the quality of what has been built.”

Work-based learning gives students the opportunity to identify abilities and explore career interests, understand the link between school and work, and provide motivation to graduate from high school and pursue postsecondary education. Employers benefit from a short-term infusion of labor that can help with seasonal or “back burner” projects, recruiting a more skilled and better prepared workforce, and building supervisory and leadership skills within the organization.

Jobs for the Future developed this toolkit as a supplement to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Career Pathways Toolkit: Six Key Elements for Success. The document focuses on the different roles and activities that workforce system participants - Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs), One-Stop Career Centers, and service providers - can assume. This toolkit includes strategies for these systems to partner with others in developing and implementing successful Career Pathways projects. 

The toolkit is designed to provide State adult education administrators and stakeholders with guidance on developing policies and practices that support low-skilled adults’ transition from adult basic education (ABE) to postsecondary education or employment. 

This toolkit guides secondary educators and administrators through the process of developing Programs of Study to prepare youth for in-demand occupations. A Program of Study is a sequence of instruction available within a particular school district that combines coursework, co-curricular activities, worksite learning, service learning, and other learning experiences to prepare students for a career.

This toolkit guides secondary educators and administrators through the process of developing Programs of Study to prepare youth for in-demand occupations. A Program of Study is a sequence of instruction available within a particular school district that combines coursework, co-curricular activities, worksite learning, service learning, and other learning experiences to prepare students for a career.

This toolkit was developed to help adult educators and other stakeholders understand and design an effective Adult Education Career Pathways (AECP) system. The goal of Florida’s AECP Initiative is to infuse adult education programs with the Career Pathways framework based upon the nationally recognized 16 career cluster model.

This toolkit was developed to improve how the workforce system engages the business community and delivers services to meet business needs. The goal of this toolkit is to help State workforce development teams plan peer learning events aimed at facilitating collaboration between the State workforce system and area employers. 

This toolkit was developed to improve how the workforce system engages the business community and delivers services to meet business needs. The goal of this toolkit is to help State workforce development teams plan peer learning events aimed at facilitating collaboration between the State workforce system and area employers. 

The purpose of this brief is to assist adult Career Pathways initiatives with engaging employers to ensure alignment with the needs of local industries. This brief helps Career Pathways projects provide their target populations with relevant workplace skills necessary for success.

This toolkit was developed to create a unifying framework of employability skills for workforce development and education professionals to use. Workforce development agencies, educational organizations, and businesses each have different definitions for employability skills, so the U.S. Department of Education set out to create a single framework of employability skills.

This guide was developed for Career Pathways stakeholders aiming to develop a performance measurement system for their initiative. 

The toolkit is designed to help community college advocates and administrators evaluate the current institutional and system policies that support or hinder student completion, discuss and prioritize needed policy changes, and track the effect of policy changes over time. 

CORD developed the Career Pathways Advisory Committee Toolkit to help educators and industry representatives use advisory committees to strengthen career and technical education programs within a Career Pathways framework

CORD developed the Career Pathways Advisory Committee Toolkit to help educators and industry representatives use advisory committees to strengthen career and technical education programs within a Career Pathways framework

The intention of this report is to give readers an understanding of the fundamentals of how to design effective learning and skill development programs for adults. These fundamentals can be applied to training at any point along the Career Pathways continuum - from adult basic education to training leading to a credential in a high-demand industry to effective workplace communication. This report was produced to support the U.S. Department of Labor's Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative.

This business engagement toolkit is designed to help community-based organizations recruit, engage, and develop ongoing relationships with businesses in their communities with the goal of creating long-term, sustainable partnerships capable of delivering the largest impact on a community's goals for youth as part of the Ready by 21 strategy.

Adult Education for Work argues that the current adult education system lacks the structure, time,
curricula, and resources to prepare individuals for postsecondary education and for good jobs. Therefore, this guide provides a framework for adult education systems to adopt, expand, and include the education and training necessary for low-skilled adults to become prepared for postsecondary education and family-sustaining employment, referred to in the guide as "Adult Education for Work."

The National Fund for Workforce Solutions believes that high-quality workforce partnerships are mutually beneficial strategies that both help low-wage workers succeed in today's competitive economy and at the same time improve the competitiveness of a group of employers in a particular industry sector. A high-quality partnership brings together employers, workers, and other key stakeholders from a selected industry sector into a regular and extended dialogue about that sector's particular characteristics, practices, and skill requirements. This guidance tool highlights the effective strategies and activities of high-performing workforce partnerships. Workforce partnerships and their funders can use it to examine their activities and competencies in order to identify where additional development is needed to strengthen their ability to function.

CLASP developed the Funding Career Pathways and Career Pathway Bridges Toolkit to help interagency State teams identify and use Federal resources to support Career Pathways models.

How to Build Bridge Programs that Fit into a Career Pathway recognizes that not all low-skill workers are ready to participate in a Career Pathways initiative with classes that start at the college level. This huge potential reservoir of workers, not only lack the necessary credentials to apply for open positions but they also lack the basic education to begin that training. This manual demonstrates how Career Pathways "bridge" programs can provide these low-skill adults with realistic opportunities to access postsecondary education and sustained employment through contextualized instruction, career development, and support services.

This guide was prepared as part of the Illinois Shifting Gears Initiative to help organizations understand and anticipate essential steps for developing a bridge program. These steps are based on three core elements:
- Contextualized instruction that integrates basic reading, math, and language skills and industry/
occupation knowledge.
- Career development that includes career exploration, career planning within a career area, and understanding the world of work (specific elements depend upon the level of the bridge program and on whether participants are already incumbent workers in the specific field).
- Transition services that provide students with the information and assistance they need to successfully navigate the process of moving from adult education or remedial coursework to credit or occupational programs. Services may include (as needed and available) academic advising, tutoring, study skills, coaching, and referrals to individual support services, e.g., transportation and childcare.

The Adult College Completion Toolkit has been developed by the Department of Education's Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) to help policymakers at the State and local level implement practical evidence-based solutions to increase the number of graduates who earn high-quality degrees and certificates required to compete for good jobs in the 21st century global economy. The toolkit is intended to connect State administrators and local practitioners with information to identify and implement State adult education leadership priorities, supported by federal Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) funds, which encourage and support adult learners transitioning to college.

This guide was created to support local initiatives focused on pathways to employment for youth, but takes a global view on collaboration and partnerships that makes it applicable to other types of initiatives. Its goal is to bolster the capacity of emerging and existing collaboratives to create lasting, "needle-moving" change.

Advancing Adults into Community Colleges provides support to community colleges interested in restructuring their programs to create clear pathways for low-skilled adults to enter professional and technical certificate and degree programs. In particular, the authors of this guide visited 25 community colleges across the country and identified incompatible and insufficient data as a significant internal hurdle that needed to be overcome before these colleges could manage their programs effectively and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs in moving students to higher levels of skills and achievement. Advancing Adults into Community Colleges provides guidance in areas central to improving data tracking in order to help community colleges determine whether they are meeting their goals and to help them find new ways to build accountability systems into their programs.

Advancing Adults into Community Colleges provides support to community colleges interested in restructuring their programs to create clear pathways for low-skilled adults to enter professional and technical certificate and degree programs. In particular, the authors of this guide visited 25 community colleges across the country and identified incompatible and insufficient data as a significant internal hurdle that needed to be overcome before these colleges could manage their programs effectively and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs in moving students to higher levels of skills and achievement. Advancing Adults into Community Colleges provides guidance in areas central to improving data tracking in order to help community colleges determine whether they are meeting their goals and to help them find new ways to build accountability systems into their programs.

The purpose of The Breaking Through Practice Guide is to help practitioners better connect adults who have low literacy and math levels with a postsecondary occupational or technical education. It highlights innovations and practices that can be used to address and circumvent institutional barriers commonly encountered when serving low-skilled adults. The practice guide focuses on innovations and best practices from community colleges that participated in the Breaking Through initiative between 2005 and 2009, allowing all practitioners to share in the peer learning activities that Breaking Through has sponsored among the initiative's college and other nonprofit partners.

The overarching goal of this guide and the Career Pathways initiatives which informed its creation is to broaden the understanding of the potential contribution of bridge programs to workforce development. More specifically the guide is intended to serve as a resource for developing and implementing bridge programs. According to the guide, "Bridge training programs prepare adults who lack adequate basic skills to enter and succeed in postsecondary education and training, leading to career-path employment. Bridge programs seek to enable students to advance both to better jobs and to further education and training, and thus are designed to provide a broad foundation for career-long learning on the job and formal post-high school education and training."

This business engagement toolkit is designed to help community-based organizations recruit, engage, and develop ongoing relationships with businesses in their communities with the goal of creating long-term, sustainable partnerships capable of delivering the largest impact on a community's goals for youth as part of the Ready by 21 strategy.

The purpose of this toolkit is to provide industry employers with an introduction to Career Pathways and encourage them to participate in Career Pathways initiatives. The introduction of the toolkit highlights the need for Career Pathways initiatives, the main components of the model, and the adult Career Pathways model which is an adaptation for adults without basic academic and technical skills, or career-limited adults. Both models include roles for secondary, postsecondary and business institutions, with more responsibilities placed on employers in the adult Career Pathways model. The introduction concludes with a call to action for employers to partner with secondary and postsecondary institutions to develop Career Pathways initiatives.

The goal of this brief is to help employment and training programs understand what their peers in the sectoral workforce development field already know: how to engage with employers. It offers tips on understanding for-profit culture and what to expect from a partnership.

This guide was created to support local initiatives focused on pathways to employment for youth, but takes a global view on collaboration and partnerships that makes it applicable to other types of initiatives. Its goal is to bolster the capacity of emerging and existing collaboratives to create lasting, "needle-moving" change.

The Career Pathways Toolkit: Six Key Elements for Success was developed as part of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration's Career Pathways Initiative to help guide State and local leaders in building and sustaining career pathway systems. The 2015 update provides information about the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act (WIOA).

This toolkit was developed as part of the Ford Foundation's Community College Bridges to Opportunity Initiative. Bridges to Opportunity was a multi-year initiative that sought to reform State policy with the aim of improving education and employment outcomes for educationally and economically disadvantaged adults in six States using a Career Pathways model.

The Career Pathways How-To Guide was one of the first attempts to collect and analyze lessons learned from the States and regions that were early adopters of the Career Pathways model. It distills the experiences of California, Kentucky, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington into a set of common defining characteristics of Career Pathways initiatives and steps for building Career Pathways in new localities.

This document offers community colleges and businesses interested in partnering on a Career Pathways initiative an insider view to each others' structures, goals, and strengths. It frames the advantages of a business-community college partnership around the imperatives of each group, so the stakeholder initiating a relationship can make the business case for a partnership.

The intention of this report is to give readers an understanding of the fundamentals of how to design effective learning and skill development programs for adults. These fundamentals can be applied to training at any point along the Career Pathways continuum - from adult basic education to training leading to a credential in a high-demand industry to effective workplace communication. This report was produced to support the U.S. Department of Labor's Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative.

The overarching goal of this guide and the Career Pathways initiatives which informed its creation is to broaden the understanding of the potential contribution of bridge programs to workforce development. More specifically the guide is intended to serve as a resource for developing and implementing bridge programs. According to the guide, "Bridge training programs prepare adults who lack adequate basic skills to enter and succeed in postsecondary education and training, leading to career-path employment. Bridge programs seek to enable students to advance both to better jobs and to further education and training, and thus are designed to provide a broad foundation for career-long learning on the job and formal post-high school education and training."

The purpose of The Breaking Through Practice Guide is to help practitioners better connect adults who have low literacy and math levels with a postsecondary occupational or technical education. It highlights innovations and practices that can be used to address and circumvent institutional barriers commonly encountered when serving low-skilled adults. The practice guide focuses on innovations and best practices from community colleges that participated in the Breaking Through initiative between 2005 and 2009, allowing all practitioners to share in the peer learning activities that Breaking Through has sponsored among the initiative's college and other nonprofit partners.

Advancing Adults into Community Colleges provides support to community colleges interested in restructuring their programs to create clear pathways for low-skilled adults to enter professional and technical certificate and degree programs. In particular, the authors of this guide visited 25 community colleges across the country and identified incompatible and insufficient data as a significant internal hurdle that needed to be overcome before these colleges could manage their programs effectively and evaluate the effectiveness of their programs in moving students to higher levels of skills and achievement. Advancing Adults into Community Colleges provides guidance in areas central to improving data tracking in order to help community colleges determine whether they are meeting their goals and to help them find new ways to build accountability systems into their programs.

Adult Education for Work argues that the current adult education system lacks the structure, time,
curricula, and resources to prepare individuals for postsecondary education and for good jobs. Therefore, this guide provides a framework for adult education systems to adopt, expand, and include the education and training necessary for low-skilled adults to become prepared for postsecondary education and family-sustaining employment, referred to in the guide as "Adult Education for Work."

The Adult College Completion Toolkit has been developed by the Department of Education's Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) to help policymakers at the State and local level implement practical evidence-based solutions to increase the number of graduates who earn high-quality degrees and certificates required to compete for good jobs in the 21st century global economy. The toolkit is intended to connect State administrators and local practitioners with information to identify and implement State adult education leadership priorities, supported by federal Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) funds, which encourage and support adult learners transitioning to college.

The Adult Career Pathways Training and Support Center (ACP-SC) is a Web site designed to support adult education practitioners interested in developing, designing, and enhancing Adult Career Pathways (ACP). ACP are defined as a series of connected education, training programs, and support services that enable individuals to secure employment within a specific industry or occupational sector and to advance over time to successively higher levels of education and employment in that sector. This Web site provides online access to instructional resources; the ability to share and review resources submitted from the field; and professional development opportunities in the form of events, instructional courses, and a growing community of practice.

The purpose of this Resource Library is to disseminate information and resources specific to the fields of Adult Basic Education and Career Pathways development. The resources in the library have been selected specifically for the Accelerating Opportunity initiative, a four-year, multistate initiative that is funding Career Pathways in at least forty community colleges between 2011 and 2014. The core belief of Accelerating Opportunity is that postsecondary credentials are the gateway to family-supporting wages and that those credentials are critical to breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty in America.

The goal of this clearinghouse is to inform the public workforce investment system about the value, development, and uses of competency models. A competency model is a collection of competencies that together define successful performance in a particular work setting, from Personal Effectiveness Competencies, such as "Initiative," to Occupation-Specific Requirements, such as "Process patient admission or discharge documents." Competency models are a tool for Career Pathways stakeholders to communicate clearly about the competencies required for specific jobs, job groups, organizations, occupations, or industries, and a framework for developing educational offerings.

This guide was prepared as part of the Illinois Shifting Gears Initiative to help organizations understand and anticipate essential steps for developing a bridge program. These steps are based on three core elements:
- Contextualized instruction that integrates basic reading, math, and language skills and industry/
occupation knowledge.
- Career development that includes career exploration, career planning within a career area, and understanding the world of work (specific elements depend upon the level of the bridge program and on whether participants are already incumbent workers in the specific field).
- Transition services that provide students with the information and assistance they need to successfully navigate the process of moving from adult education or remedial coursework to credit or occupational programs. Services may include (as needed and available) academic advising, tutoring, study skills, coaching, and referrals to individual support services, e.g., transportation and childcare.

The National Fund for Workforce Solutions believes that high-quality workforce partnerships are mutually beneficial strategies that both help low-wage workers succeed in today's competitive economy and at the same time improve the competitiveness of a group of employers in a particular industry sector. A high-quality partnership brings together employers, workers, and other key stakeholders from a selected industry sector into a regular and extended dialogue about that sector's particular characteristics, practices, and skill requirements. This guidance tool highlights the effective strategies and activities of high-performing workforce partnerships. Workforce partnerships and their funders can use it to examine their activities and competencies in order to identify where additional development is needed to strengthen their ability to function.

The purpose of this toolkit is to provide industry employers with an introduction to Career Pathways and encourage them to participate in Career Pathways initiatives. The introduction of the toolkit highlights the need for Career Pathways initiatives, the main components of the model, and the adult Career Pathways model which is an adaptation for adults without basic academic and technical skills, or career-limited adults. Both models include roles for secondary, postsecondary and business institutions, with more responsibilities placed on employers in the adult Career Pathways model. The introduction concludes with a call to action for employers to partner with secondary and postsecondary institutions to develop Career Pathways initiatives.

The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins IV) envisions that all students will achieve challenging academic and technical standards and be prepared for high-skill, high-wage, or high-demand occupations in current or emerging professions in the 21st century global economy. To this end, Perkins IV requires States to offer programs of study (POS) comprised of academic, career, and technical content that prepares students to make successful transitions to postsecondary education and the workplace. In order to guide Local Education Agencies in the development of rigorous programs of study, OCTAE created a Programs of Study Design Framework, which has been validated nationally by education and industry stakeholders and "sets the bar" for rigorous career and technical education.

This guide shares lessons learned from the 2006-2007 Strategic Partnerships for a Competitive Workforce (SPCW) initiative, in which U.S. Department of Labor Community-Based Job Training program grantees formalized Career Pathways partnerships with local education institutions, the workforce investment system, employers, State or local agencies, and other community groups. SPCW was a joint initiative of the U.S. departments of Education and Labor.

Measuring Business Impact is a guide on sector-based workforce development programs, focusing on how to engage with businesses and measure the benefits of workforce development interventions. The guide is meant to address any knowledge gap workforce development practitioners may have in terms of engaging with businesses and measuring their programs' business impact. The guide argues that measuring business impact must move beyond telling good stories about the benefits of training to more systematic examination of the changes in worker performance that result from training and how these changes are valued by the businesses involved. In turn, this will build the capacity of workforce development practitioners, businesses, and educational institutions to more systematically align training design and business goals.

The Manufacturing Skills Certification System was created to ensure that postsecondary certificate programs in manufacturing would be uniformly responsive to the industry's needs across the country. The System supplies industry-driven certifications that align to identified competencies, sample curricula, and a framework for evaluating existing programs of study to prepare students to acquire those certifications. The Manufacturing Institute hosts the Manufacturing Skills Certification System resource materials to help stakeholders tailor and implement the certification system to their region's needs.

This guidebook disseminates best practices and lessons learned for designing and implementing green-collar job training programs. Based on programs in California including but not limited to the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, this guidebook strives to assist workforce development professionals and government officials in creating, launching, and managing green-collar training programs.

The Jobs to Careers Toolkit is a step-by-step guide to designing and implementing work-based learning projects for frontline workers. Work-based learning is an approach to adult education intended to capture, document, formalize, and reward learning that occurs on the job. In work-based learning projects, employers and education and training providers determine the competencies needed for a particular occupation and then structure ways to teach these competencies in a work setting. Once students demonstrate they have mastered such competencies, they can receive academic credit or industry-recognized credentials.

The Jobs to Careers Milestone Tool provides a blueprint for practitioners designing or modifying a work-based learning project. Developing a work-based learning project can be a prime opportunity for a Career Pathways initiative to provide on-the-job training for low-skill workers. Intended to be used consistently and updated regularly, this toolkit can serve as a valuable project management tool for work-based learning projects.

How to Build Bridge Programs that Fit into a Career Pathway recognizes that not all low-skill workers are ready to participate in a Career Pathways initiative with classes that start at the college level. This huge potential reservoir of workers, not only lack the necessary credentials to apply for open positions but they also lack the basic education to begin that training. This manual demonstrates how Career Pathways "bridge" programs can provide these low-skill adults with realistic opportunities to access postsecondary education and sustained employment through contextualized instruction, career development, and support services.

This guide aims to advance colleges' understanding of how to access and use labor market data to improve student success. Specifically, the guide addresses how colleges can use labor market data to:
- Decide which programs to offer and how many students to enroll to meet the labor market demand for those credentials;
- Assess program effectiveness in terms of competencies and post-graduation success;
- Help students make informed choices about which programs and Career Pathways to pursue; and
- Demonstrate to the State and other stakeholders that investments in the college are worthwhile, and that resources are being invested to deliver graduates able to contribute to their families, communities, and States.

A Green Career Pathways Framework explores the extent to which green jobs-jobs that contribute to meeting the goal of achieving environmental sustainability-offer a pathway out of poverty for low-income young people, many of whom have disengaged from school and are struggling to find a way into the economic mainstream. This paper offers guidance on how youth programs can learn more about and access industry-driven green credentialing and Career Pathways development work within local communities or regions. It also discusses how youth programs can then work with employers and postsecondary partners to build on-ramps to postsecondary technical training programs and entry to green careers.

CLASP developed the Funding Career Pathways and Career Pathway Bridges Toolkit to help interagency State teams identify and use Federal resources to support Career Pathways models.

ABE Career Connections provides guidance for adult basic education (ABE) providers who seek to align their services and programming with local Career Pathways efforts in order to create better educational and professional outcomes for their students. It reminds readers that many low-skill working adults need to focus on improving basic skills like English language, writing, and mathematics before they can enter a vocational education setting to acquire a postsecondary credential or degree. The manual also identifies transitional points within the education pipeline that are often problematic for ABE students, where Career Pathways practitioners may need to provide extra support.