Standardizing Success: How INROADS Built a Nationwide Career-Readiness Framework

Customer Profile

The client, INROADS, is a nonprofit organization that bolsters students' professional development and offers them skills and resources for success. Through partnerships with private and public corporations across the United States, INROADS connects talented students with opportunities that foster professional growth, network building, and long-term career advancement. Driven by a commitment to student support and success, the INROADS team seeks to ensure their professional development offerings are continuously relevant and beneficial to students during their tenure with the organization.

Challenge

Students embark on their INROADS journey from different colleges and universities across the nation, with each student having differences in professional preparedness and experience. While this diversity is a beauty of INROADS, it also became a challenge when differences in professional performance arose once students went out into their internships. 

La’Nita Johnson was actually a beneficiary of INROADS while in college. After years of building scalable curricula for various organizations, La’Nita offered her services to the non-profit. INROADS was at an impasse, as there was no method in place to identify and close gaps in student readiness. This is where Johnson intervened with a vision of how she could establish cohesion in intern performance amongst corporate partners. She reached out to INROADS’ National Director of Learning and Development, Yvonne McKinnon, to fill that readiness gap with a cohort model that would establish consistency, enhance student preparedness, and elevate outcomes across internship placements nationwide.

Solution

With her expertise in positive leadership development, workforce development, and tailored facilitation, La’Nita Johnson set out on creating this training design series. She brought a unique perspective to this solution as a former 3x INROADS intern herself. Her approach utilized that first-hand perspective, in addition to her extensive experience in youth development intervention. Having spent a transformative six years as a U.S. diplomat, she worked across various initiatives including a $60M youth workforce development project. She strategically blended her insights to tailor a curriculum that matched the realities that students would soon face in a global workforce. With an approach grounded in an understanding of her college-aged audience and their learning styles, she incorporated positive youth development frameworks such as the 12 Principles of Adult Learning and the ADDIE model into her curriculum design to create an encouraging, engaging, and effective training. Additionally, she seamlessly integrated these frameworks with NACE (The National Association of Colleges and Employers) competencies, which are eight defined core career readiness competencies– skills universally valued by employers– that are key to early career performance. Her mastery in curricular design and ability to pilot and facilitate a new national curriculum shined in her final product, a six-week, cohort-based model that every prospective INROADS intern must successfully complete before becoming eligible for an internship.