The Hook
Advance CTE just closed out a five-year, six-community initiative called the New Skills ready network, funded by JPMorgan Chase’s $350 million New Skills at Work campaign. The final report and reflections from Executive Director Kate Kreamer offer something rare in CTE: lessons from a project that had enough time to fail, adjust, and actually succeed. Almost 100,000 learners are now enrolled in high-quality career pathways across the six sites as a result. For CTE program designers in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, the takeaways are directly applicable to local pathway work.
Why This Matters Now
Philadelphia is in the middle of its own CTE expansion, with new programs, employer partnerships, and pathway initiatives launching every year. But building a pathway on paper is different from sustaining one over time. The New Skills ready network worked with six communities — Boston, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, and Nashville — over five years to improve how local and state partners collaborate on career pathways. The lessons they learned are the kind that only emerge from doing the work long enough to see what breaks.
Lesson 1: Work Moves at the Speed of Trust
The most repeated phrase among participants was “work moves at the speed of trust.” Sites that tried to move fast on paper without building real relationships between schools, employers, and community partners stalled out. Sites that invested time in leadership structures, regular convening, and transparency with partners made more progress — even though they spent more time upfront on relationship-building.
For Philadelphia CTE programs, this means employer partnerships need more than a signature on a memorandum of understanding. CTE instructors who meet regularly with industry partners, host employer visits, and co-design competency units are building the kind of trust that leads to sustainable programs. The employer who shows up for an advisory meeting once a year is not the same as the employer who co-teaches a unit.
Lesson 2: Intermediaries Are Essential, Not Optional
The New Skills ready network elevated the role of intermediaries — organizations or individuals that sit between CTE programs, postsecondary institutions, and employers to coordinate the work. Before this initiative, intermediaries were often treated as administrative extras. After five years of evidence, Advance CTE argues they are central to scaling career pathways.
Philadelphia already has intermediary organizations — the Philadelphia Youth Network, Philadelphia Works, and various employer associations — but CTE programs do not always use them effectively. The lesson from the New Skills ready network is that intermediaries should be treated as strategic partners in pathway design, not just placement services. They can broker employer relationships, align secondary and postsecondary curriculum, and help track outcomes that individual schools cannot capture alone.
Lesson 3: Do Not Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good With Data
Every CTE program leader knows the frustration of incomplete data. The New Skills ready network sites struggled with inconsistent definitions across states, gaps in postsecondary tracking, and difficulty measuring long-term outcomes. Their response was pragmatic: use the data you have, invest in incremental improvements, and supplement quantitative gaps with qualitative input from learners and employers.
For Philadelphia CTE programs, this means you do not need a perfect data system to start making decisions. Use credential pass rates, employer feedback, and student surveys alongside whatever postsecondary tracking you have. The key is to use data strategically — to identify which programs have strong outcomes and which need intervention — rather than waiting for a unified data platform that may never arrive.
Lesson 4: Sustainability Must Be Planned, Not Hoped For
Advance CTE deliberately spent the final year of the initiative focusing on sustainability — how to keep the work going after the funding ended. This is unusual. Most initiatives plan sustainability as an afterthought. The New Skills ready network sites identified additional funding streams, embedded practices into existing structures, and ensured that leadership teams would continue meeting.
Philadelphia CTE programs should build sustainability planning into every grant-funded initiative from the beginning. When a new program launches with Perkins or external grant funding, the question should not be “What will we do with this money?” but “What will this program look like in five years when this grant runs out?”
Lesson 5: Learner Voice Is a Design Tool, Not a Checkbox
The strongest sites in the network found ways to center learner voice in pathway design — not just through end-of-year surveys, but through ongoing engagement. Denver’s annual L/Earner Voice Symposium became a platform for students to shape program decisions. Columbus hired a communications firm early on to research how learners and families experience pathways, using those insights to redesign recruitment and messaging.
Philadelphia CTE programs can apply this by creating student advisory councils at the program level, conducting regular focus groups with CTE completers, and using student feedback to adjust curriculum sequencing. The learners who move through your programs know things about the experience that no administrator can see from an office.
Applying This in Your CTE Context
Start with one lesson. Pick the area where your program is weakest — trust-building, intermediary use, data practices, sustainability, or learner voice — and focus there. The New Skills ready network proved that career pathway transformation is a long game, but the practices that make it work are not complicated. They require consistency, honesty about what is and is not working, and a willingness to adjust course.
Five years from now, the CTE programs that thrive will be the ones that treated pathway design as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time build. The evidence is in. The question is what we do with it.
Originally reported by Advance CTE | PhillyCTE
