The Blue Valley Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) launched 12 years ago with a few dozen students doing internships at and projects for businesses in a Kansas City suburb. Enrollment expanded when a state of the art building was added a few years later, and CAPS quickly became a national leader in what they call profession-based learning.
Learning by doing is not a new idea but in the 80s and 90s career and technical education had, in many school districts, been relegated to the trades and was for students not deemed to be college material.
A dozen years ago, Blue Valley high schools were very good at academic preparation but most students received limited exposure to career alternatives and limited professional skill building. CAPS targeted the fastest growing high skill, high demand careers and the sectors offering the most attractive entrepreneurial opportunities.
CAPS structurally empowers high school students — primarily juniors and seniors — to fast forward into their future with full immersion into the professional culture, solving real world problems, using industry standard tools and are mentored by actual employers. The model integrates high school, college and industry into a single community to provide a set of authentic experiences.
With growing enrollment and successful graduates came national exposure. In 2015, Executive Director Corey Mohn invited interested school districts to join the CAPS Network to expand access to profession-based learning and to learn from each other. Today 139 school districts participate in the network across 20 states and three countries.
Affiliate members of CAPS Network receive support in three primary ways: best-practice sharing around cutting-edge experiential learning; troubleshooting opportunities with a trusted cadre of like-minded educators; and the ability to share and cross-promote local successes. CAPS affiliates connect synchronously and asynchronously on a weekly basis and share resources using the CAPS tech platform, the Colab.
Last fall, members of the CAPS Network surveyed participating students. They found remarkable improvement in every category. On the level of career awareness, the percentage of students confident or very confident rose from 14.5% to 82.8%.
CAPS students reported dramatic increases in confidence in professional skills (again, a combination of confident and very confident):
- Professional communication: 14.0% to 81.9%
- Building a professional resume: 13.0% to 73.8%
- Delivering an effective elevator pitch: 12.6% to 67.4%
- Professional presentation: 23.4% to 76.9%
- Professional conversations: 25.0% to 80.6%
- Accessing a professional network: 11.9% to 66.1%
- Owning strengths and passion: 26.7% to 78.3%
- Collaborating on a team: 38.1% to 83.5%
- Planning/executing a project: 22.7% to 77.1%
- Positively respond to a mistake: 32.2% to 79.6%
- Confidence in ability to be successful: 36.0% to 83.3%
- Level of career awareness: 14.5% to 82.8%
This reported improvement in confidence represents not only core career skills but initial formation of professional identity and a powerful sense of agency.
"CAPS was the best thing I could have ever done. It made me more confident in myself and what I'm passionate about. It made me confident in my decision for my career path and major," reported a 2020 CAPS student.
Participating school districts share a commitment to profession-based learning, often in a half day program, where teachers develop real-world, project-based learning strategies through collaborations with business and community partners. They share values of responsiveness, exploration, entrepreneurial mindset and professional skills development.
In a regional effort with similar aims, the original CAPS director, Donna Deeds McDaniel, leads the Real World Learning initiative in metro Kansas City for the Kauffman Foundation. The 75 participating high schools are adding internships, client projects, and entrepreneurial experiences to learner pathways to produce more of the CAPS-like outcomes.
Imagine if every student in America left high school confident of their professional skills, aware of career opportunities, owning their strengths and passions, and able to activate a professional network—it would be a different economy and country.
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February 24, 2022 at 11:27PM
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How the CAPS Network is Transforming Career Readiness - Forbes
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