Let’s Design What’s Next – Together
We partner with colleges and systems to design and scale learn-and-work solutions that drive economic mobility.
PARTNER WITH US
The future of education-to-work systems won’t be built by any one institution alone. It will be co-designed—across sectors, with learners at the center, and grounded in real-world needs. We work with partners across the learn-and-work ecosystem:
Education Providers
Foundations
Employers + Industry Groups
States + Regions
Together, we can move from ideas to action—co-designing, testing, and scaling solutions that expand opportunity and drive economic mobility.
OUR EXPERTISE
The Lab’s unique differentiator — human-centered design — builds the capacity of partners to design solutions with learners at the center. Our design process starts with the experiences and goals of learners — designing with and for them.
Our approach draws on more than a decade of experience in human-centered design service delivery, developing tools for skills-based innovations and systemic redesign.
We are a diverse team that brings a boundary-spanning mix of expertise in community colleges, workforce development, K-12, policy, and entrepreneurship. Our expert facilitators — Education Designers — lead high-impact design arcs that engage stakeholders in designing, testing, and scaling breakthrough ideas.
Together with Education Design Lab, we are seizing a once-in-a-generation chance to transform the way we meet students’ needs and shore up faith in community college as a pathway to greater opportunity
Dr. Michael A. Baston
President of Cuyahoga Community College (Ohio), pictured center
OUR SERVICES
Pathway Design
We work with community colleges, K-12, and employers to design skills-based pathways into good jobs, with a focus on pathways that do not require a four-year degree, including work-based learning models and dual enrollment pathways.
Micro-Pathways
Work-Based Learning Models
Early Pathways
Workforce Pell Pathway Design
Explore a Pathway Design Project
The Community College Growth Engine has launched 325+ micro-pathways with 120+ community colleges across 11 industry sectors
VIEW COmmunity College growth Engine →
Strategic Planning + Change Management
An iterative, co-design process to better align institutional strategies to the future of work. The Lab works with college systems, entire campuses, and cross-department design teams to drive strategic transformation using proven design processes.
Explore our Strategic Planning Project
Through our Reimagining Community Colleges initiative, we have created a design framework for transforming community colleges into future-ready, inclusive institutions by rethinking traditional strategic planning and co-designing more learner-centered approaches that meet the evolving needs of students and regional employers.
VIEW Reimagining Community Colleges →
RFP + Grantee Management
We manage large-scale, multi-stakeholder initiatives in partnership with philanthropy, bringing specialized expertise in design, facilitation, communities of practice, technical assistance, and capturing impact across projects.
Explore an RFP + Grant Example
The Lab brings experience in raising, managing, and distributing grant funding to fuel innovation, providing cohort-level peer learning and impact collection, including the $3.5 million Advancing Workforce Mobility initiative with Walmart.
VIEW Advancing Workforce Mobility →
Communities of Practice
Leading communities of practice or cohorts of grantees through an iterative, collaborative process that drives new solution design, promotes peer learning, elevates best practices, and captures insights for the cohort and the field.
Explore a Community of Practce
The Lab has led numerous communities of practice, including RuralTogether (community of 1,600 rural practitioners) and a parenting learner community of practice.
VIEW Rural Together →
Talent Pipeline Design
We partner with employers and industry groups to map skills to job roles. We also design pathways with industry credentials and durable skills and facilitate regional employer/education consortia to activate skills-based talent pipelines.
Explore Talent Pipeline + Pathway Design
We have a proven track record of working with regional talent intermediaries, including regional workforce collaborative AdvanceNC and five rural talent collaborative s with community colleges at the center.
VIEW strengthening the rural workforce →
Collective Impact + System Design
Partnering with state agencies and regional intermediaries to solve complex systemic misalignments, supporting deeper partnerships at the state or regional level to align fragmented learn-and-work systems, and co-designing new solutions with stakeholders across a state or region.
Explore a Coalition Design Project
Learning Mobility Collaboratives: The Lab leads state higher education and workforce leaders through a facilitated process for establishing the policies, partnerships, and technical infrastructure needed to empower learners to document, validate, and transfer their learning across education and workforce ecosystems.
VIEW Learning Collaboratives →
Working with the Education Design Lab has been the secret sauce to advancing an ambitious, innovative approach to measuring student success. With the help of the Lab, we will soon give employers greater confidence in hiring our graduates and help students get to where they want to be.
Dr. Lee Ann Nutt
President of Lone Star College-Tomball (Texas), pictured front row, second from left
