We know students learn better with personalized attention that adapts to their needs, shifts with their goals, and provides validation – especially during the college-to-career transition.
But it is rare to find a career development tool that adapts to adult learners’ needs or addresses their specific gaps in professional capital, a term coined by the teaching profession to describe an individual’s preparation for professional success.
These gaps are what our Professional Capital Framework is designed to close. The goal is to design systems that help students build professional capital continuously and systematically – not too late or haphazardly, when they may be scrambling for a job, but throughout their entire learning journey.
This series focuses on the interactions that the first dimension of the network – knowledge, skills, and abilities-building – has with other dimensions that institutions often treat as an afterthought or a “nice-to-have” rather than a core area of student development. In this post, that dimension is social and network capital.
Why social and network capital matters
Most of us associate higher education with technical knowledge, skills, and credentials. We see a credential earned as evidence of mastered skills. But students don’t normally earn a credential in networking, even though research shows networking drives half of all job placements:
“An estimated half of jobs and internships come through networks – and not through our closest friends and loved ones, as you might expect, but instead through acquaintances, or ‘weak ties.’ The further you network away from your friends, the closer you get to your next job,” says Julia Freeland Fischer in her piece about AI’s opportunity paradox.
Institutions typically treat skill-building and networking-building as separate activities. Skill-building receives dedicated syllabus space and formal assessment; networking does not. But these dimensions are deeply interdependent and should be scaffolded together across the student experience. When instructional designers explicitly integrate networking-building activities into the curriculum, they create structured, natural opportunities for students to successfully enter and navigate professional communities.
How we’re exploring learning experiences and network building
Testing a mini-course
We tested two things with this project. First, could simple adjustments to course content and activities provide boosts to students' professional capital building? Second, could we build an AI tool capable of layering professional capital content and activities into a learning pathway? To tackle the second one, we developed an AI agent in our learning design course authoring system, Lazuli. We wanted any teacher in any subject to be able to add a professional capital layer into any course.
We used the agent to create a mini-course called “Writing for the Audience.” The mini-course layers the knowledge, skills, and abilities dimension with other dimensions from the framework.
Simple adjustments to course content can give students practice in both areas simultaneously. In one activity, students practiced rewording a message for a less technical audience (knowledge, skills, and abilities dimension) and connected with a peer or mentor for feedback (network dimension). In another activity, seven students volunteered to test out our mini-course and agreed to interview. Not only did the students engage in network building as part of the course activities, but five of them also engaged in a networking activity after taking the mini-course, even without additional prompting or incentive. On their own, they wrote LinkedIn posts, revised cover letters, submitted internship applications, made concrete plans to reach out to people in target career roles, planned to attend professional events, shared drafts with professionals, and reconnected with former mentors. What’s more, these five were earlier-career, less experienced, and less connected than the other two students – the students who need to build this capital. From these very early tests we saw the potential value of making social network both an explicit but also embedded and natural part of the learning experience.
What is still unknown?
We are still working through the next steps. What we're asking ourselves: How does course length affect the students’ perceived value of integrated activities? Because we are layering all dimensions – sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly – we don’t yet know what the ideal density of layering dimensions is. How many professionally integrated activities belong in a full-length course? Are there industry-specific skills that don’t integrate as naturally with social and network capital development?
What else is happening?
We have two other studies in the works. We are currently testing a “Building Social Capital” course that helps students map, grow, and maintain their networks. We are also testing an app that helps students cultivate communities and build networks in small cohorts. The app relies on evidence that smaller cohorts provide more opportunity to create those weaker-yet-meaningful ties. The idea is for administrator-initiated activities to establish group norms. After that, the cohort itself is encouraged to drive and shape activities.
Part three in our series takes up a dimension even harder to name and measure: dispositional capital. Read from the beginning: part one.
Related research
