Establishing clear links between the steps in a student’s education pathway is key to supporting credential completion, particularly in Career and Technical Education (CTE), where students use a variety of learning modalities to build their careers, including secondary and postsecondary classroom instruction and credentials, apprenticeships, internships, and employment experiences.
The goal of a recent statewide project by San Jacinto College was to make one of these links explicit through the creation of crosswalks between U.S. Department of Labor-registered apprenticeship training programs and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB)-approved CTE courses. This work was supported by the Texas Workforce Commission and a THECB Perkins Leadership Grant.
Field experts were utilized to put together the Apprenticeship Crosswalks. In November 2017 and May 2018, technical faculty and representatives from various training organizations offering registered training programs met to define appropriate crosswalks from the skills and training taught in those programs and the courses in the THECB Workforce Education Curriculum Manual, commonly known as WECM. Eighteen crosswalks in various CTE fields were developed through this consultative process.
The Apprenticeship Crosswalks are designed to help Texas community colleges, employers, and training organizations work together to assure college credit for individuals who have completed a registered apprenticeship program. For instance, colleges can use these crosswalks and work within their own college guidelines to provide credit for prior learning for those journeymen who have completed a registered apprenticeship.