Nashville, Tennessee is one of the six sites selected to participate in the New Skills ready network. This five-year initiative, launched by JPMorgan Chase. in 2020, aims to improve student completion of high-quality career pathways. In the third year of the initiative, the Nashville, Tennessee, New Skills ready network team focused their efforts on implementation through pilot projects to maximize the potential of the learner experience in work-based learning (WBL) and postsecondary persistence. Other activities in pursuit of this goal included expansion of dual enrollment for the project’s priority schools, leveraging a work-based learning coordinator to scale existing opportunities, and funding eight pilot projects to improve secondary and postsecondary connections and wraparound supports. This snapshot provides a summary of the three major priorities of Nashville, Tennessee’s New Skills ready network team:
- Ensuring that learners have transparent secondary and postsecondary career pathways that align to one another and to in-demand, high-wage careers that meet labor market needs;
- Enhancing experiential learning by defining and implementing best practice WBL models and learner-centric secondary and postsecondary experiences; and
- Increasing the enrollment and postsecondary persistence of historically under-represented learners in postsecondary education.
