What Features Are New With Pathful (formerly Explore & Connect)

July 20, 2024

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Helping students find their path beyond school is an ever-evolving responsibility for schools and districts. Students are now expected to begin planning their futures earlier than ever, with this process becoming increasingly integrated into the school day. Furthermore, work-based learning is now recognized as a crucial component of this journey. However, it brings its own unique challenges, such as identifying and vetting suitable mentors and managing transportation for students.

To support this, the Pathful team has been diligently working on significant updates to our platform this year. These enhancements will improve the connectivity, usability, and accessibility of the features you and your students love, while also introducing new tools designed to help students discover the best path for their future.

The first thing you’ll notice when you log in to Pathful, is that you’ll only need one log-in to access both the CCE and WBL modules (formerly Connect and Explore). Next, you will notice our new streamlined user interface. We’ve focused on making the platform more student friendly and navigable, while also making the features you know and love easier to find. All of your favorite parts of Pathful Explore are still available in the new Pathful platform, but some of them have moved to new places within the platform. To help you find everything you need quickly while you get used to this transition, we put together this guide.

However, we did more than just change the interface. As more states and districts recognize the importance of career and college planning, as well as work-based learning, Pathful continues to expand its available lessons, video libraries, live session calendar, and ever-growing pool of industry professionals. Here are just some of the new feature available in the platform:

WBL:

• New WBL Schedule and Sessions: Each month Pathful will be presenting employability workshops, career conversations targeting different grades (K-12), a live work-place tour, and a weekly session (based on a different theme each month).
• Industry-Led Projects: Pathful industry-led projects are problem-based learning experiences that give students an opportunity to really experience the world of work. Everything from the problem itself to the way students are assessed is created in partnership with industry experts. This includes the option for live industry mentorship and feedback. See an example here.
• Updated Session Request Form: We have streamlined and simplified the session request form to make requesting your own session even easier!

CCE:

• Employability Lessons: Access to 40+ employability lessons on topics such as futuristic finance, workplace readiness and skills for academic success.
• Microcredentials: After completing certain courses, students can earn microcredentials to show their accomplishments.
• New Virtual Job Shadow, CCE, and Employability Videos: Our in-house video team continues to scour the country for unique and sought-after opportunities, allowing us to expand our exclusive, industry-leading video libraries.

Reporting:

• A combined platform means combined reporting, which means you can now access all your reports for both CCE and WBL content all in one place. We have also increased the ease of accessing and reading these reports, while also adding new reports to our repertoire.

UserWay:

• UserWay offers students an enhanced digital experience by ensuring web accessibility and usability. Their tools help make Pathful more inclusive for all students, including those with disabilities, by providing features like text-to-speech, customizable display settings, language translation, and keyboard navigation. See more about Pathful Accessibility features here.

By actively listening to feedback from educators and students, we strive to meet the ever-changing needs of modern learners. Our commitment to excellence is evident in our regular updates to the platform that integrate cutting-edge technology, personalized learning paths, collaborative tools, and robust analytics, all designed to make career education more engaging, accessible, and effective.

In that spirit, we would like to share some upcoming features you can expect in the near future:

• Lifestyle Calculator: An all-new way for students to approach the decision of what they want to do beyond school. Students answer a suite of questions on topics from from spending habits to work-life balanced, and receive a target salary range and job recommendations based on county-level data
• Work-based learning and community service experience tracker: Students will now be able to track in-person WBL and community service experiences in Pathful, and teachers, students, and admin can report on and monitor progress towards hour requirements
• AI LinkedIn Profile Builder and Resume and Cover Letter Builders: We’re working on a whole new way for students to create documentation of their professional experiences. Stay tuned for more updates.

Log in today to check out these amazing new features and sign-up for our mailer here to stay up-to-date as more features are released this fall.