What is the Pipeline?
The Kansas Career Pipeline is a nonprofit, Internet-based educational and career development tool that allows Kansas students and adults to discover their interests, learn about careers, plan for education, and ultimately connect with employers in the state. It serves three distinct needs:
- Students and adult job seekers need meaningful careers and the educational pathways to help them succeed.
- Educators need to attract and engage students, then help them become well-rounded, job-ready graduates.
- Businesses need employees who are motivated and prepared to succeed in the workplace.
Students have lacked the strategic tools to help them reach the right career destinations.Educators want to play a more meaningful role in providing the right skills to students, but have been largely disconnected from the practical needs of employers—and have lacked the assessment tools to place incoming students in programs that offer high likelihoods of success based on individual skills, interests, and work values.
Human resource departments are skilled at screening candidates, but recruitment is expensive, and often doesn’t adequately match applicants to career opportunities. Traditional job placement services provide employers with limited candidate information.The Kansas Career Pipeline will coordinate the needs of these three groups.
Building the Pipeline
The Pipeline is a database-driven, user-friendly system that will soon connect all the components. Here’s how it works:
- The Pipeline gives students and adult job seekers free online access to the Kuder® Assessments, provided in partnership with the Kansas State Department of Education, the Kansas Department of Commerce, and the Kansas Board of Regents.
- Employers place field trip, volunteer, e-mentoring, internship, job-shadowing, scholarship, and employment opportunities in the Pipeline.
- Educators place educational and training opportunities in the Pipeline.
- The Pipeline matches individuals (based on their assessments) with the appropriate educators and employers.
Who can use the Pipeline?
- Students
- Counselors
- Teachers
- Parents
- Adult Job Candidates
- Adults in Career Transitions
- Military Personnel
- Employers
- Retirees
- People with Disabilities
- Policy- & Decision-makers
What’s happened so far, and what’s next?
The educational end of the Pipeline has been in place for some time, and is undergoing constant expansion. The Pipeline’s Kuder® Assessments are already in use in hundreds of Kansas schools, helping students identify career skills in real-world contexts. They’re helping counselors identify educational strategies to transform students into job-ready adults. Soon, Workforce Centers around the state will utilize the same assessments to help adult job seekers strategize their futures. These two components represent what might be termed the “supply end” of the Pipeline.
The business end or “receiving end” is rapidly being developed with the help of business principals and human resource professionals around the state. The Kansas Career Pipeline is a comprehensive clearinghouse that takes the guesswork out of the career placement process.