Multiple pilots. One framework.
Real learners.
Each pilot is a working experiment in AI-age workforce preparation, built around the same framework, tested with a different population, designed to produce findings the field can use. Here is who each pilot serves and what it tests.
Four Points on the Path
Undergraduates: Own Your Learning
At CSU Monterey Bay we teach the framework inside regular degree courses at three points in the undergraduate years: a first-year physics course, a junior-year professional seminar, and the senior capstone. In each course, students set their own learning goals, use AI as a thinking partner rather than an answer source, and account for the part of the work they did themselves. Teaching at all three levels in the same semester gives us the space to test the framework with first-year students and graduating seniors at the same time.
Undergraduates: Open Source Work-Based Learning
For college students from multiple disciplines early in their degree journey, this pilot gives them real work experience making a significant contribution to the problem being addressed by an open source project, working on real teams, with real deadlines and real feedback. Over fifteen years, more than 750 students, most of them from community colleges, have done this work. We are now redesigning it as a shorter micro-internship open to students outside computing.
Graduating Seniors: Career Intelligence
For graduating seniors and recent graduates from any discipline entering the job market. The program develops their durable capabilities in the context of their own job search, from knowing what they bring, to knowing the market, to finding the gaps where they add value. The first cohort of about 25 graduates ran in summer 2026, and we are revising the program from what we learned.
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Mid-Career: Build Solutions with a Human Touch
For working professionals in roles such as finance, HR, and operations whose jobs are being reshaped by AI. This ten-week, non-credit certificate, offered with De Anza College, has two courses, Reframing Problems with AI and Designing Solutions with AI. The first cohort begins in September 2026.
Where We Are Headed
Today the four points above all sit inside post-secondary education, with De Anza College as our first partner institution. Our plan is to extend the same framework and the same experimental design to two more kinds of partners: workforce boards, so that people outside a college can reach these learning experiences, and employers, so that we can learn what human value looks like in real work and design toward it. We are building those relationships now.
