Access to accurate and accessible career information is essential to advancing economic mobility and job quality. Yet, today’s jobseekers, workforce professionals, and educators often lack timely insights into emerging, high-quality career opportunities and their pathways for advancement. This information gap is especially harmful to low-income and underrepresented individuals who face structural inequities in the labor market.
How can learners, jobseekers, career counselors, and navigators access easy to use, up to date occupational information and data to inform their career choices?
CSW offers clients and partners a suite of tools that can help bridge this divide. Our career pathways, credential pathways, and other related tools were designed to advance equitable economic mobility by providing easy to understand information about in-demand occupations, the skills and credentials needed, and their job quality and advancement opportunities.
Our tools can be used by clients and partners to strengthen their work in the following ways:
- As learner- and jobseeker-facing resources to support career decision making that leads to economic sustainability
- As a career navigation resource for career counselors and navigators
- As a resource to support Business Services Professionals in developing quality jobs and expanding connections with higher-quality employers
- For information to use in education and occupational program development
- As a critical tool and resource for those working to develop and implement career pathways programs, career pathways systems, and industry sector partnerships.
- As important tools to facilitate the recognition of prior learning so that educators can provide credit to learners, shortening their path to credentials, leading to quality jobs and careers for learners and jobseekers.
CSW’s Career and Credential Pathways Approach
Through our decades of partnership with learners, workers, workforce organizations, training providers, and educational institutions, CSW has identified the following critical components for quality career and credential pathways.
Equity and Job-Quality-Centered
Our tools and services are designed with job quality and equity in mind. When appropriate, we also tailor our tools to the specific populations served (e.g., formerly incarcerated, etc.).
Regional
Opportunity varies from city to city. Our tools are developed using regional labor market information to ensure that users have information about where they live and work.
User Validated
We validate our tools with the learners, jobseekers, career counselors, and navigators. They are designed for to ensure they provide the information users need and want.
Employer Validated
Opportunity also varies from employer to employer. We customize our tools to feedback from regional employers to ensure the right jobs, skills, and wage range are listed.
Skills-Verified
Many learners and jobseekers possess important work-ready skills that go unrecognized due to a lack of credentialing. Our tools are designed to determine what an individual knows and can do and position them for employment, regardless of the source of learning.
Providing clearer roadmaps for learners and workers.
Supporting career and education navigation.
Work With Us
Career Pathways Mapping
CSW develops regional employer and learner-validated career pathway maps designed to provide necessary information about available in demand jobs. Our maps are designed to outline accessible points of entry into a career as well as opportunities to move into advanced, higher paying jobs and the paths to get there. By turning data into actionable guidance, CSW helps more jobseekers connect to fulfilling, economically-sustaining, lifelong careers that meet their personal needs and priorities.
Credential Pathways Mapping
CSW helps colleges, workforce organizations, regions, and communities strengthen education and training pathways so they lead to valuable credentials and quality jobs. Using a rigorous mapping process, we align educational programs with real workforce demands and conduct gap analyses to identify needed curriculum updates. These blueprints and pathways deepen partnerships between education and industry, support individuals in making informed career decisions, and build a future-ready workforce.
Occupational Profiles
CSW develops occupational competency profiles that outline the skills, job functions, credentials, experience levels, and estimated regional wages associated with each role. Using labor market intelligence, industry research, and subject-matter expert input, we ensure each profile accurately reflects real workforce needs. Profiles can be created for both existing and emerging occupations, incorporating trends, employer insights, and competency-based analysis. These validated profiles support curriculum development, career navigation, and employer hiring by providing clear, actionable occupational information.
Join us in improving education and career outcomes:
Career and Credential Pathways Projects
Michigan Food System Initiatives
Since 2021, CSW, with funding from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has led The Michigan Agriculture and Food Systems Workforce Advancement Initiative (MAFSWAI) in partnership with the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity; the Institute of Agriculture Technology, Center for Regional Food Systems, and Migrant Student Services at Michigan State University; and Michigan Food and Farming Systems. As part of this project, CSW updated and translated the 2021 Michigan Food System Career Pathways as well as developed Career and Occupational Profiles for key food system roles. This work was built on previous work developed by CSW and the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University. LEARN MORE
Credential As You Go
Credential As You Go (CAYG) is a national movement to build an incremental credentialing system that recognizes learning as it occurs and creates clearer, more flexible education-to-career pathways. By embedding smaller, stackable credentials within traditional programs, CAYG helps learners document progress, gain labor-market value, and move more smoothly into further education and employment. Led by SUNY Empire State University, George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, and Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), the initiative is supported by a broad network of institutions, policymakers, and advisors. CSW has played a central role in building this network, developing 14 practical playbooks, convening stakeholders, and providing technical assistance that helps colleges design and scale pathway-aligned credentials. Over six years of research, CAYG has documented significant momentum—institutions revising policies, expanding incremental credential options, and strengthening learner pathways across a 54-member higher education network and a 132-member advisory board—while also identifying the need for clearer guidance and models. To support this continued transformation, CAYG is developing tools that help institutions assess their current state, understand pathway opportunities, measure progress, and plan next steps toward a fully incremental credentialing system. LEARN MORE
Virginia Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Workforce Initiative
CSW is supporting the Richmond-Petersburg Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Workforce Initiative, led by the Community College Workforce Alliance, to create a scalable, robust workforce system to support advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing (APM) and the biotechnology sector in Virginia’s Richmond and Petersburg region. CSW’s role includes producing competency-based occupational profiles, developing career and educational pathway maps, conducting a gap analysis, and supporting the mapping of the occupational competencies to training and education program outcomes. LEARN MORE
Scaling Manufacturing and Renewables Training (SMART Iowa)
CSW and Hawkeye Community College have partnered on SMART Iowa, a five-year, U.S. Department of Labor – funded initiative to align regional workforce development planning with emerging, high-growth occupations in climate-forward sectors while diversifying workforce pipelines in Iowa’s Cedar Valley region. Through occupational profiling, labor market research, and career pathway mapping, CSW supports awareness and access to critical infrastructure sectors, such as EV technologies, battery manufacturing, and advanced automation. The resulting occupational profiles will inform curricula, learner advising, and new program development.
Michigan Justice Fund Career Pathways and Profiles Project
CSW partnered with the Michigan Justice Fund to conduct a Statewide Landscape Analysis and Assessment to understand gaps in Michigan’s workforce system that prevent residents with justice-involvement from achieving economic mobility. As part of the project, CSW conducted significant research with Michiganders who were formerly justice-involved to understand their career interests and goals. As an output of this work, CSW developed a series of career pathways and profiles that reflect both those population-specific goals, occupations accessible to those who have been justice-involved, and occupations that will be critical for Michigan’s future economic success. These maps and profiles provide jobseekers and learners, as well as career counselors, navigators, and educational advisors, necessary information about career options and their potential for advancement within four occupational groups that show potential for family-sustaining careers in Michigan.
Southwestern Oregon Community College CPL Framework
Southwestern Oregon Community College (SWOCC) engaged CSW to enhance workforce development outcomes by implementing a Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) framework. This initiative was designed to attract and support local adult learners by awarding credit for non-academic learning and experience and providing those learners with pathways to new careers. SWOCC also hoped to boost SWOCC enrollment and prepare a worker pipeline for local industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, and hospitality. Through competency evaluations, gap analyses, and curriculum mapping, the project provided SWOCC faculty with tools leading to the recognition of prior learning. The result of the work was a process and methodology for awarding credit for workforce programs and a Credit for Prior Learning Implementation Framework. LEARN MORE
Alabama Occupational Competency Analysis
CSW was engaged by the Alabama Governor’s Office of Education & Workforce Transformation and state workforce and education leaders to strengthen the use of competencies across the state’s talent management system, providing an organizing framework that enables users of the Alabama Skills–Job Description Generator to easily search for and select competencies when building skills-based job descriptions. The work included strategic advising, use-case development, and designing and implementing a process for auditing competency-based occupational profiles. CSW created a cross-industry structure of business functions, standardized and expanded occupationally specific technical competencies, identified related credentials, and outlined proficiency levels for each competency. This effort resulted in hundreds of new competency statements and audits of more than 350 high-demand occupations. The competencies developed now serve as foundational data powering three statewide workforce and education tools: a competency-based job description generator for employers, a credential registry for educators, and learning and employment records and credential wallets for learners and job seekers. LEARN MORE
Support improvements in worker skills, lifelong learning, and job quality: