High school students in Chicago’s south suburbs (e.g., Chicago Southland) face a fragmented landscape of college and career preparation. Career and technical education programs, early college coursework, and work-based learning opportunities exist across the region—but they often operate in isolation, disconnected from one another and from clear postsecondary outcomes. Without intentional alignment across high schools, community colleges, and employers, students struggle to see how their coursework connects to careers, and educators lack a shared roadmap for guiding students through secondary and postsecondary transitions.
At the same time, regional employers need a skilled workforce, but often don’t know how to effectively engage with education systems or where their industry connects to student learning pathways. This lack of coordination limits students’ access to high-quality career preparation and makes it harder for the region to meet workforce demand.
Strong regional pathways require more than good intentions—they require structured collaboration, clear alignment to state policy frameworks, and systems that connect education and workforce partners around shared goals.
Our Role
EdSystems serves as the project convener, technical assistance provider, and design partner for the Chicago Southland Regional Pathways Initiative. Working in partnership with South Suburban College and Prairie State College, we are guiding regional stakeholders through a structured, collaborative process to design and implement coherent secondary-to-postsecondary pathways aligned with workforce demand and state policy.
Beginning in 2025, we facilitated cross-sector working groups that bring together community colleges, school districts, employers, and community partners to co-create regional pathway models. Through this process, the regional team identified priority industry sectors, informed by labor market analysis, and mapped college and career pathways that incorporate high-quality Career and Technical Education (CTE), early college coursework, and work-based learning experiences. Additionally, EdSystems conducted a scan of current work-based learning opportunities and identified gaps and opportunities for scaling.
Through this work, we are helping the Chicago Southland region translate policy and labor market data into actionable pathway models that reflect diverse stakeholder perspectives, support consistent implementation across systems, and can be scaled to benefit students.
