A Year of Career-Connected Learning: Early Lessons From the Field 

Every day, afterschool and summer educators help young people discover new interests and imagine new possibilities for their future.

Those experiences become even more powerful when they help young people understand where their interests can take them.

That’s the guiding idea behind STEM Next’s Career-Connected Learning Framework, a practical guide to help afterschool educators intentionally connect hands-on STEM activities to career awareness, exploration, and preparation in ways that are practical, engaging, and age-appropriate.

Since the framework’s launch in 2025, STEM Next has led a multi-pronged field-building effort to help educators put it into practice through free virtual training sessions, practical resources, and a six-state implementation initiative with statewide afterschool networks. Along the way, educators helped test, refine, and strengthen the approach, generating valuable insights from both program leaders and young people that will inform future expansion across the afterschool and summer learning field.

Together, these efforts have helped build the capacity of 1,500 educators, statewide leaders, and other afterschool professionals who collectively serve more than 113,000 young people.

Here are a few of the most important lessons we’ve learned so far. 

Building Capacity for Scale

This fall, six states joined STEM Next’s Working Together for Tomorrow Community of Practice, an in-depth learning community for state afterschool network leaders to learn the Career-Connected Learning Framework by experiencing it as participants, and then build the facilitation skills to bring that learning back to programs in their states. Through a train-the-trainer approach, state leaders received practical resources, facilitation experience, and ongoing coaching as they supported local educators in their implementation throughout the spring and early summer. 

This model is fundamental to STEM Next’s approach to scaling national strategies across the afterschool and summer learning field because it supports states to not only implement new approaches across program sites, but adapt them to fit local realities.

Across the six participating states — Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Vermont — educators reported greater confidence in their ability to deliver career-connected learning after completing the training. Nearly every participant said they felt prepared to begin implementing the framework with young people, and all agreed the experience strengthened their ability to build career awareness, exploration, and preparation into their programs. 

“I felt more confident in the information that I was explaining to the community of practice, and I felt more confident with the resources,” said Adriana Slaughter, program manager with the Iowa Afterschool Alliance.

Helping Youth See Themselves in STEM Fields

One of the program participants in Iowa is Al Exito, a nonprofit afterschool provider serving more than 800 Latino youth from fifth grade through high school across the state. While college and career readiness has long been a focus of Al Exito, connecting career learning experiences to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) hadn’t been a structured focus of the programs’ curriculum, according to Executive Director Gabby Guerra.

She piloted the STEM Next’s Career-Connected Learning Framework with a program of 20 middle schoolers over six weeks, which gave her the opportunity to test a more structured focus on STEM career learning and learn what works to get kids engaged. 

At first, the idea didn’t exactly sound exciting to the youth. 

“At the beginning, when I showed up, I was like, ‘we’re going to do STEM stuff,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, no!’” she said, adding that towards the end of the six weeks, “they didn’t want it to end. They wanted to continue with the projects.”

One strategy that immediately captured students’ interest was asking them which careers they were already curious about. Several said engineering and medicine, so Guerra shaped the early weeks of career exploration activities around those careers. 

“We had them do some research and presentation. We played career bingo. And we mostly talked about, where are you going to find these careers in our community? And what is it that they do, and is it different than what you expected?” She said, referencing some of the key concepts of the framework.

Another element that worked for Guerra’s group was letting them take the lead and shape what they wanted to learn, something Al Exito and many afterschool programs naturally facilitate. 

“Having them do hands-on projects that they have choice with… giving them a chance to let us know what their opinions are, having them choose how their projects are going to go, giving them opportunity to present and make mistakes, and they’re not being graded on it, so it doesn’t have to feel like life or death when you’re working on something, but it feels like the stakes are lower — that changes the environment of their learning,” she said. 

Using these and many more insights and resources she gained during the Community of Practice experience, Guerra can now spread the curriculum she built with the framework to 18 other program sites she oversees across Iowa.

Heidi Brown, director of the Iowa Afterschool Alliance, sees what Guerra is building as a model for the kind of durable, systems-level change the framework is meant to produce. “It’s really about building ecosystems that can sustain programming over time,” she said.

‘They know that it’s possible’ 

Momentum is building in the other participating states, too. Ignite Afterschool, Minnesota’s statewide afterschool network, launched a training series with an initial cohort of 10 program sites and has already secured additional funding from the Minnesota STEM Ecosystem to launch a second cohort.

Keem Anderson, assistant director at Ignite Afterschool, said one of the most rewarding moments so far was seeing the framework come to life when one of the organizations involved in the cohort brought together students from multiple sites for a leadership camp featuring hands-on career exploration with local professionals. 

“It was good to just be in community and see the young people just their perspective kind of opening up, like, ‘oh, I can do that. I didn’t even know this was a job field or an opportunity that I can do,’” he said. 

A core tenet of the framework is encouraging programs to take advantage of their community setting and bring in STEM professionals and relatable role models working in the community.

Guerra said this was a particularly powerful element for her program in Iowa. She invited Latino students from Des Moines University pursuing careers in medicine during the program’s final week. They offered college and career advice and even brought in real organs for the students to see and touch.

“When we bring in people that look like them, that have the careers that they’re interested in… they know that it’s possible that they can do that,” Guerra said. “That was pretty big for our students.”

The Working Together Community of Practice and other initiatives of the Institute for a STEM Ready America are made possible by our partners. Our work in Iowa is supported by our partners at the Arconic Foundation. Learn more about our partners and how to get involved with STEM Next.