Co-Designing Assessment and Learning: Rethinking Employer Engagement in a Changing World. Occasional Paper #39

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce--the world's largest business federation--and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation have for the past five years been attempting to bridge the gap and address trust issues between the postsecondary education community and employer community. Rather than placing limitations on the curriculum or taking away academic freedom from faculty, such a partnership has the potential to unlock new learning pathways that can meet the needs of today's diverse learners. With this in mind, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation created the Talent Pipeline Management® (TPM) movement as an effort to bridge the divide between postsecondary education and the employer community. TPM® provides a framework for re-imagining the partnership of these two communities, co-designing learning pathways, and developing authentic, performance-based challenges and learning experiences that address the demonstration of learning gap. In this Occasional Paper, we describe the unique challenges a dynamic, changing labor market poses for employer-education partnerships; including the inherent limitations of current alignment practices and tools. Then, we introduce TPM as a partnership model that allows employers to more meaningfully signal their competency needs to educators and how educators can, in turn, describe their evidence of learning in ways that are understood by employers relative to those competency needs. The latter half of the paper explores how employers and education partners can use TPM as a framework for engaging one another in co-designing learning pathways that produce evidence of learning that is meaningful to both sides. [Foreword by Natasha A. Jankowski.]