College & Career Readiness Radio

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Corey Koopmans, founder of InternCrew. Corey says workers' compensation, liability, age restrictions, payroll requirements, and administrative responsibilities can all become barriers for employers interested in hiring high school interns.According to Koopmans, large companies present an additional challenge. A local office may want to partner with a school, only to encounter corporate policies that make hiring high school students difficult.Corey describes an employer-of-record model as one way to remove much of that friction by managing screening, onboarding, payroll, insurance, compliance, time tracking, and feedback.Paid work-based learning is an important part of the equation for Koopmans. Removing administrative barriers can bring more employers into the process and ultimately create more paid opportunities for students.Corey also sees an opportunity to extend internships beyond the traditional school calendar. Year-round management can allow students to continue working during the summer when some industries have even greater demand.Authentic work experience requires authentic accountability, according to Koopmans. Students need to understand workplace expectations, receive meaningful feedback, and experience real consequences when those expectations aren't met.He views even losing an internship as a potential learning experience. Students can learn about attendance, performance, professionalism, and workplace norms before entering their first full-time job.When it comes to internship quality, he argues that students need to actually engage in meaningful work. A welding student, for example, shouldn't spend the experience simply sweeping the floor instead of developing relevant skills.Corey suggests that scaling internships may also require employers to rethink how the work itself is structured. Shorter shifts, project-based teams, and “gig-style” arrangements could create paid opportunities for more students while still providing value to employers.From an employer perspective, Koopmans sees internships as part of a larger talent strategy. Early exposure can introduce students to careers while helping organizations develop a pipeline of potential future employees.Ultimately, Corey believes students shouldn't simply be around the work. High-quality internships should allow them to do the work, build relevant skills, receive feedback, and understand what success looks like.His final message captures the value of these experiences: “There's no such thing as success and failure. There's only success and learning, and learning can only occur through experience.”College & Career Readiness Radio is brought to you by MaiaLearning, your fully comprehensive college and career planning tool, including the ability to plan and track internship experiences for students. Schedule a demo today.

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Dr. Mark Covelle, Administrative Director of Middle Bucks Institute of Technology and a Founding Member of the CTE Collective. Mark says that interest in CTE has surged post-COVID because hands-on, authentic learning could not be replicated online. The skilled trades gap has added further momentum nationally.He notes that in CTE, students practice — they work on real brakes, deploy real safety equipment, and build real things. Traditional classrooms more often ask students to pretend. Kids know the difference, and it affects their engagement.His school serves 1,000 students across 21 career programs and issued over 1,500 industry-recognized credentials last year — roughly 1.5 per student. These credentials are portable, tangible evidence of skill beyond a transcript.Business and industry partners tell Mark the biggest gaps in young workers are persistence (stalling when stuck), communication, and general professionalism. MBIT grades students on employability weekly — resumes, interviewing, professional conduct, and workplace interaction are all part of the curriculum.Mark believes that every K-12 school should have an internship program. Students need professional feedback at 18, not 24. Even virtual or industry-problem-based experiences count. Getting that feedback earlier — with educator support — changes outcomes.Mark and TJ discuss how authentic problems can live in any classroom. An English problem-solution paper can be drawn from a real local business challenge. A student who needs math to complete an engineering project will learn that math. Purpose drives motivation.Mark tells a story about involving students in school branding. MBIT's "ambition" identity came from a student who noticed MBIT sits inside the word ambition. It became a neon lobby sign, a podcast, and a school-wide hashtag — and it stuck because students created it.Mark's closing message: authenticity matters. Authentic learning builds trust, persistence, and a positive relationship with school — the skills employers say are missing most.College & Career Readiness Radio is brought to you by MaiaLearning, a fully comprehensive college and career readiness platform serving students worldwide.

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is best-selling author of Careers By the People, Mike Wysocki.Mike Wysocki discusses how his own career path shaped his focus on career readiness. As a first-generation, low-income student, his early goal was simply to go to college and get a job in business. After graduating, he found the experience underwhelming and unfulfilling. Even when he later moved into well-paid tech sales in Los Angeles, the work felt unchallenging and disconnected from his interests. That realization led him to ask others about their careers, which ultimately inspired his book Careers by the People, featuring candid advice from more than 100 professionals.Through his research and speaking with students, Wysocki has found that many young people remain confused about career paths, particularly outside elite universities. He believes the connection between education and the workforce is often weak, with students lacking awareness of industries, networking strategies, and professional tools like LinkedIn.Wysocki pushes back on the idea that students should simply follow passion or talent alone. Instead, he encourages students to identify industries that genuinely interest them and then apply their strengths within those fields. Building a network within an industry makes it easier to move between roles such as sales, operations, or marketing while maintaining connections and credibility.A key piece of his advice is for students to speak directly with experienced professionals. Conversations with people who have spent years in a field—and especially those who have left it—provide more realistic insight than relying on peers or family members alone. Hearing multiple perspectives helps students better understand the pros and cons of different careers.Wysocki also emphasizes that many students only know careers within their family networks, which can limit awareness of other opportunities. Expanding exposure to different industries earlier in life can help students discover options that better match their interests.Reflecting on his own experience, Wysocki says college was valuable because it helped him build writing skills, confidence, and broader knowledge. He believes higher education can be transformative, particularly for students from working-class backgrounds, but students must also use that time to actively explore careers and build professional connections.His upcoming book examines how current college students prepare for the workforce, using detailed questionnaires with students from state universities across the United States. The goal is to better understand their career thinking, preparation strategies, and the gaps that still exist between college and the workplace.Wysocki encourages educators to leverage alumni networks and retired professionals when helping students explore careers. Alumni can share practical experience, while retirees often feel freer to speak candidly about the realities of their industries.

This episode of College and Career Readiness Radio features Kim Gameroz, founder of Teaching Inside Out and SELbrate Good Times.Kim defines SEL as intentionally teaching students how the social world works so they can function successfully in life and work, rather than assuming they already possess these skills. She emphasizes cognitive flexibility (shifting when things do not go a student’s way), emotional intelligence (accurately identifying emotions and using strategies like mood meters and zones of regulation), perspective taking (jumping into the mind of another person, character, or historical figure), and executive functioning (goal setting, planning, and adapting plans) as core elements educators must actively teach.​For classroom practice, Kim urges educators to embed SEL into daily systems and routines instead of treating it as an add-on program. She describes an intentional feelings check-in that always pairs “How are you feeling?” with “What tool will you use to support yourself right now?” so students build a toolbox of self-regulation strategies and then reflect later on whether those tools actually helped.​Kim stresses that the real “solution” begins with the adult: SEL is not about fixing kids, but about educators making a mindset shift toward teaching lagging skills rather than punishing behavior. She challenges teachers, counselors, and leaders to be intentional in their responses, avoid explosive reactions, and recognize that they are not meant to do this work alone; instead, they should “find their herd” of like-minded colleagues who believe SEL must be taught, not assumed.​Drawing from her upcoming book, Becoming the BISON, Kim uses the bison metaphor to describe educators who “run into the storm” together rather than avoiding hard situations like challenging behaviors, difficult parent emails, and classroom chaos. Bison represent being intentional so others notice—choosing actions that create a sense of calm, unity, and growth mindset for students, and modeling cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation during inevitable storms.​Kim offers concrete modeling moves for elementary classrooms, such as “mental dress rehearsals” of transitions where students act out expectations with their hands before moving their bodies. She frontloads potential problems (e.g., what to do if someone takes your spot) and explicitly teaches flexible responses, then uses calm prompts like “Was that part of your path?” to coach outliers toward expectations rather than relying on punishment.​For secondary students, Kim adapts the same rehearsal idea to executive functioning and future planning. She suggests guiding students through visualizations of going home, managing after-school schedules, and deciding when and how they will study or complete assignments, helping them mentally sequence steps and adjust plans when life “storms” disrupt the day.​Kim explicitly connects these SEL competencies—emotional intelligence, planning, organization, cognitive flexibility, and co-regulation—to college and career readiness as durable, transferable skills. She notes that adult life requires constantly shifting plans, regulating emotions under stress (from broken pipes to workplace conflicts), and working productively with people who may be difficult, all of which mirror the SEL work students must practice in school.​Her closing message to educators is clear: “Teach social and emotional skills, don’t expect them.” When a student’s behavior is frustrating, she encourages adults to ask, “What skill is lagging?” and remember that “kids do well if they can,” shifting from blame to instruction and from expectation to intentional teaching.

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Jan Jardine. Jan Jardine explains how work-based learning helps students connect classroom learning with real-world careers through internships, apprenticeships, and CAPS-style industry projects, often revealing both what students love and what is not a good fit before they invest in postsecondary education.She describes how CAPS programs “bring industry to students” by embedding them in professional environments where they work in teams on authentic client projects, practicing skills like communication, project management, and handling iterative feedback instead of just observing adults at work.She emphasizes the importance of starting career-connected learning earlier, moving beyond a 9–12 or “just CTE” model by integrating projects and industry connections into middle school courses like College and Career Awareness and even elementary-level career exploration, so students do not “meander” through pathways without direction.Jan also pushes for breaking down silos between core academics and CTE, sharing examples of engineering students who independently applied calculus to design a moving staircase prototype, illustrating how interdisciplinary, project-based work makes academic content meaningful.​For rural and under-resourced communities, Jan urges educators to treat the school system itself as an industry partner—leveraging child nutrition, IT, transportation, HR, and other internal departments, as well as nearby community colleges, to create rich work-based learning experiences even where external employers are scarce.She reflects on the 2025 ACTE CareerTech Vision conference (in New Orleans this year), noting growing national momentum: more conference sessions on rural innovation, younger grades, and postsecondary collaboration.Jan highlights the upcoming National Work-Based Learning Conference in Rhode Island (April 29–May 1), where sessions will range from foundations for new coordinators to advanced topics for experienced leaders looking to “level up” their programs, with special attention to business partner engagement and rural models.She also shares details about the ACTE-sponsored Leadership Alliance for Work-Based Learning, a new cohort for 10 practitioners that includes in-person learning at the conference, five virtual sessions, and a capstone project to be presented at the 2027 conference, designed to help leaders tackle real challenges in their own contexts.​Her call to action for educators is simple but powerful: share your story—do not assume your work is “no big deal,” because when you consistently tell students’ success stories, communities, industry partners, and policymakers better understand the impact and begin to advocate for and invest in this work.

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Brandon Busteed. Brandon says that work-integrated learning connects traditional academic study with learning that happens on the job and includes not only internships, but also co-ops, apprenticeships, job shadowing, and long-term classroom projects designed with industry input.​Brandon points out that internships are a game changer: students who have an internship in college are about twice as likely to secure a good job at graduation and remain engaged in their careers, but under a third of graduates actually have such internships with real classroom applicability.​​He emphasizes that the biggest problems are scale and equity, noting that while 8.2 million college students want internships, only 3.6 million receive one; access skews toward students with more resources and social connections.​Brandon argues that the internship supply-demand gap could be closed if every employer devoted 5% of their jobs to interns, and that even paying all interns fairly would be comparable in cost to other large-scale federal investments.​According to Brandon, the quality of internships matters as much as their availability: longer internships yield better results, but any length is valuable if there’s a meaningful project, feedback, and structured reflection alongside clear learning goals.​He believes that high-quality, work-integrated learning can and should be embedded into classrooms through real-world, project-based work that exposes students to a variety of industry roles.​Brandon’s work at Edconic includes “industry immersive” programs, which partner with well-known organizations so students can experience hands-on projects, receive direct feedback, and learn about multiple types of jobs even if traditional internships aren’t an option.​He insists that co-designing and co-teaching these experiences with educators and industry leaders is critical, as educators bring assessment and pedagogical skill while industry partners provide real-world context and mentorship.​Brandon says that parents and educators often focus too much on grades and test scores, undervaluing work experience even though it’s vital for career success.​Lastly, Brandon calls for a culture shift: he believes that policymakers, schools, parents, and employers need to treat paid, quality work experiences as a fundamental part of education, not just an option for a privileged few.

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Scott Carr from CESA2 in Wisconsin. Scott specializes in connecting academic learning with real-world applications through career and community readiness frameworks.​He emphasizes that lasting change in education starts with shifting mindsets and moving away from compliance-based systems to a re-culturing process focused on purpose and relevance.​The transformation involves multiple phases: re-culturing and visioning (year one), engaging a readiness team of educators, piloting innovative classroom practices (year two), and full universal implementation led by teacher champions (year three).​Scott highlights the impact on teachers, notably increased self-efficacy, rejuvenation, and desire for meaningful change, as well as improved student engagement, purpose, and attendance.​Real-world application is achieved by having students work in collaborative teams with assigned roles and responsibilities, centering classroom activities on profession-based themes, and shifting grading from compliance to content defense and discovery.​He shares real-life examples, demonstrating that classes using profession-based learning see higher engagement, accountability, and proficiency rates—even in controlled, A/B test settings compared to traditional methods.​Community and business partners are actively involved in work-based learning, benefiting both students and local organizations.​Scott advocates for measuring impact through journey maps, testimonials, and portfolio-based assessments, rather than relying only on test scores—though test scores and other academic benchmarks still matter.​The key takeaway for educators: meaningful change is “not doing more, it’s doing differently”—restructuring practice to energize teachers and students, not simply adding to their workload.If you’re interested in hearing more about tools that can facilitate what Scott discussed, including a student portfolio, book a time here to talk to the host of the show.

Our guest for this episode of College & Career Readiness Radio is Raymond Thiry from Access ASU.Ray highlights the complex requirements for college eligibility—such as 16 core required courses and a minimum GPA—that often differ from state high school graduation requirements. Without monitoring these, many students miss out on university options they are close to qualifying for.Ray notes that high school counselors in Arizona (and beyond) are stretched thin, with ratios around 650:1, making it hard to track and support all students in becoming college-eligible.Access ASU bridges these gaps for students—especially first-generation college-bound students—by providing hands-on support for applications, FAFSA, and navigating system complexities. Ray and his colleagues work directly with K-12 schools and communities, often in Spanish as well.He underscores the importance of demystifying the real cost of college. Published tuition is not the price most students actually pay; with scholarships, need-based aid, work programs, and employer tuition benefits, college is often more affordable than families expect.Ray advocates for aligning high school course planning to university eligibility from the beginning, reverse-engineering programs to ensure more students naturally meet admissions requirements.He insists that “access” includes communicating the value of university as well as explaining career and technical pathways, but warns against misconceptions: low transfer and completion rates at community colleges mean pathways must be followed carefully.Ray shares that institutions like ASU offer student success programs such as the “First Eight Weeks” and practical classes on “how to do college,” which are especially helpful for first-generation and low-income students.For schools, Ray recommends improved data sharing and direct admissions strategies to bridge high school and college transitions smoothly.His billboard message: No one regrets getting their degree—invest in access, preparation, and planning for every student’s future.