Originally reported by Digital Promise | PhillyCTE
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When a pre-apprentice at Philadelphia’s Electrical Training Center wires a commercial building downtown, the electrical code they follow is national — but the supply chain for the components they install is global. When a health sciences student at Dobbins completes a clinical rotation at Jefferson Health, the patient demographics they encounter reflect dozens of countries and languages. And when a construction trades student reads blueprints for a new SEPTA facility, the project management software tracking the build was developed by a team spread across three continents. Global competence is not an add-on to career and technical education — it is a workforce requirement that CTE programs are uniquely positioned to address.
A free professional development course and toolkit from Digital Promise, created by Asia Society’s Center for Global Education in partnership with ACTE and Advance CTE, argues exactly this point. The resource, titled “Global Competence Through Career and Technical Education,” provides CTE instructors with a structured framework for integrating global awareness into existing programs — without abandoning the industry-specific competencies that make CTE valuable in the first place.
The Case for Global Competence in CTE
The economic case is straightforward. One in ten Americans is foreign-born, and local communities — urban, suburban, and rural — are growing more diverse. To take advantage of global market opportunities, companies must hire workers with global competence: the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance. In Philadelphia, a city where the immigrant population has grown steadily over the past two decades, employers increasingly need workers who can communicate across cultures, navigate international supply chains, and serve diverse client populations.
For CTE programs, this is not an abstract educational goal. It is a workforce development imperative. Philadelphia’s employer partners — from Jefferson Health to SEPTA to the building trades — operate in environments where global awareness directly affects the bottom line. A construction foreman who cannot communicate with a multilingual crew is a liability. A nursing assistant who does not understand cultural health practices is a safety risk. An IT technician who cannot navigate international compliance standards is a bottleneck.
The Digital Promise initiative frames global competence as a critical new imperative for CTE educators: to prepare all students for work and civic roles in a world where success increasingly requires the ability to compete, connect, and cooperate on an international scale. The resource provides a structured pathway for CTE instructors to build this competence without redesigning their entire curriculum.
What the Professional Development Course Offers
The Global Competence Through CTE professional development course consists of two online, interactive, video-based modules and accompanying tools that can be customized to the local context of any CTE educator. The course is available through ACTE’s CTE Learn Community at no cost, and educators can earn a badge of completion from NOCTI — the same organization that administers industry-recognized competency exams for many CTE programs, including several in Pennsylvania.
Module One: Understanding Global Competence
The first module introduces the concept of global competence and makes the case for why it matters in career and technical education. A project management approach to instruction is reinforced throughout the module — a natural fit for CTE programs that already use competency-based, project-driven instructional models. The module includes chapters and articles defining global competence, career profile interviews featuring professionals speaking to the global nature of their careers, global leadership performance outcomes and rubrics to guide instruction and assessment, career exploration projects, and activities connecting workforce readiness skills to global competencies.
For Philadelphia CTE instructors, this module offers a critical reframing: global competence is not about learning world geography. It is about understanding how an industry operates across borders, how cultural context shapes professional practice, and how to communicate effectively with colleagues and clients from different backgrounds. For a culinary arts instructor at a Philadelphia CTE program, this might mean examining how the restaurant industry sources ingredients globally, how kitchen brigades operate in different countries, and how to adapt recipes and service for diverse customer bases.
Module Two: Integrating Global Issues Into Existing Curriculum
The second module introduces teachers to how global issues and project management approaches can be integrated into existing curriculum. This is where the resource becomes practically useful for CTE instructors who are already stretched thin. The module demonstrates how global competence and project management already align to CTE standards and classrooms — it does not ask instructors to add a separate global competence unit on top of everything else.
The module includes crosswalks of the Common Career Technical Core (common CTE standards), global competence, and project management to identify their overlap and natural alignment. It reviews the global components of the Career Ready Practices developed by Advance CTE and adopted by 42 states — including Pennsylvania. It provides sample projects and units integrated with global themes and content, plus existing tools related to project management.
This is particularly relevant for Pennsylvania programs. The Pennsylvania Department of Education’s CTE standards align with the Career Ready Practices, which already include global awareness components. The Digital Promise resource helps instructors see where those global components already exist in their curriculum — and how to make them explicit rather than implicit.
The Toolkit: Practical Resources for CTE Classrooms
Beyond the professional development modules, the accompanying toolkit provides resources designed for immediate classroom use:
Sample projects ready to be used in CTE classrooms, adaptable to different career clusters and local contexts. For a Philadelphia construction trades program, a sample project might involve examining how building codes differ across countries and what that means for international construction firms — a real consideration for any student who might work for a multinational contractor.
Global career planning resources that help students explore how their chosen career pathway operates in an international context. For health sciences students, this might mean researching how patient care models differ across health systems and what opportunities exist for globally mobile healthcare professionals.
Workforce readiness rubrics that assess global competence alongside technical skills — giving instructors a tool to evaluate students on both dimensions simultaneously, rather than treating global competence as a separate grade.
Crosswalks of global education and CTE standards that show where the two already overlap, making it clear that integrating global competence is about strengthening existing instruction, not adding a new burden.
Global career profile videos featuring professionals discussing the global dimensions of their work — providing students with role models who can articulate why global competence matters in specific industries.
The Philadelphia Context
Philadelphia is uniquely positioned to benefit from this approach. The city’s CTE programs serve a student population that is already diverse — and that diversity is an asset, not a challenge to be managed. When CTE instructors use the “Who Are My Students” activity from the Digital Promise course, they discover that their own classrooms contain the global connections they are being asked to teach about. Students who speak multiple languages, whose families maintain transnational ties, or who have lived experience of different cultural contexts bring exactly the global competence that employers need — if instructors know how to leverage it.
The Philadelphia Workforce Development Corporation and PA CareerLink both identify global readiness as a workforce priority for the region’s employers. The city’s position as a healthcare hub, an education center, and a logistics corridor means that graduates who can operate across cultural contexts have a competitive advantage in the local job market. CTE programs that explicitly build global competence are not just enriching their curriculum — they are giving students a credential that translates directly to employer value.
Badge and Credential Alignment
One of the most practical aspects of the Digital Promise resource is its connection to NOCTI badging. NOCTI is already the credentialing body for many Pennsylvania CTE programs — the same organization that administers the industry competency exams that Philadelphia students take for their program completions. Adding a global competence badge to a student’s portfolio alongside their NOCTI technical credential creates a stackable credential profile that signals to employers: this graduate can do the job, and they can do it in a globally connected workplace.
For Pennsylvania CTE programs operating under Perkins V requirements — which emphasize both technical skill attainment and employability skills — the global competence framework provides a structured way to document and assess the employability skills that are often the hardest to measure. It turns a soft skill into a documented competency.
Making It Work in Practice
The Digital Promise resource is free, customizable, and designed to be integrated into existing curriculum rather than replacing it. For Philadelphia CTE programs, the implementation path is straightforward:
- Identify a program team — a CTE instructor, a co-op employer partner, and an administrator — to review the toolkit and identify which resources align with existing program competencies.
- Complete the professional development modules — the 10–12 hour course can be completed individually or as a team, and the NOCTI badge provides a tangible credential for the instructor’s professional development record.
- Select one sample project from the toolkit and adapt it to the local Philadelphia context — using local employer partners, local workforce data, and local career profiles.
- Use the crosswalks to map where global competence already appears in the program’s existing CTE standards and make those connections explicit to students.
- Assess using the workforce readiness rubrics — integrating global competence into existing competency-based assessment rather than creating a separate evaluation.
The opportunity is clear. Global competence is a workforce skill that Philadelphia employers need and that CTE programs are uniquely positioned to deliver. The Digital Promise resource provides the framework, the tools, and the professional development support to make it happen — at no cost to the program. The only investment required is intentionality.
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Source: Digital Promise, “Global Competence Through Career and Technical Education.” digitalpromise.org | PhillyCTE
