Emsi Partners With Complete College America on Exciting ‘Purpose First’ Project

Emsi is pleased to announce we have partnered with Complete College America (CCA) on its innovative Purpose First project. Emsi and CCA both strongly believe in the “purpose first” concept: If you help a student figure out their ultimate career goal, they will stick with school and find success in the workplace. CCA launched Purpose First in order to prove this thesis.

Funded by Strada Education Network (formerly USA Funds), Purpose First has a simple but game-changing mission: provide advising tools that help students build and execute a career plan. The two featured tools are Emsi’s Career Coach and Education Advisory Board’s (EAB) Navigate.

Career Coach and Navigate are such powerful complements, you’d think they were designed with each other in mind. While Career Coach focuses on the front end of college, Navigate concentrates on getting students through education to careers. Career Coach helps students choose careers that align with their personality and select the necessary program out of their school’s offerings. Navigate, then, helps them through select a career pathway—and stay on it. If Career Coach provides a career vision, Navigate keeps students accountable to that vision.

“Students need real-time, national, and regional labor market data that highlights required degree levels and credentials, associated skills, expected salaries, and future demand,” said Dhanfu Elston, vice president of alliance state relations for CCA. This is exactly the data that Purpose First provides students through Career Coach and Navigate.

Purpose First has already hit the ground in five states: New Hampshire, Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, and Hawaii. Within the five, multiple institutions have been selected as demonstration sites for implementing Purpose First. Most institutions have adopted either one or the other, but this summer, New Hampshire became the first to capitalize on Career Coach and Navigate’s compatibility and sign with both.

DXTERA Institute has also rolled up its sleeves, coming alongside Purpose First to integrate Career Coach and Navigate onto the demonstration schools’ websites. To measure the success of these tools, Complete College America is conducting a two-year report, again with support from Strada.

For nearly twenty years, Emsi’s mission has been to help college students create a vision and strategy for their education and career. We are extraordinarily pleased to be working with Complete College America and EAB on such a momentous project. In the months to come, we look forward to the great success that comes when students and leaders in higher education put purpose first.

Learn more about Purpose First here. If you’d like to discuss Emsi’s work on the project, please contact Bob Hieronymus at [email protected]. 

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