At SXSW EDU 2025, the Catalyze community hosted a standing-room-only workshop—underscoring the growing demand for expanding access to CCL for all learners. Through interactive exercises, participants explored practical, learner-centered strategies that support middle and high school students to build agency to chart their own career paths.

What was the biggest takeaway from Catalyze at SXSW EDU 2025? Careers aren’t linear, and neither is learning. Career-Connected Learning (CCL) provides the roadmap that empowers all learners to design their own journeys.

Catalyze’s recent webinar Insights and Learnings from the Catalyze Community of Practice brought together leaders from CUNY, New Bridge Cleveland and nXu for an engaging conversation about social capital and a holistic approach to career-connected learning.

Catalyze can’t wait to see you at SXSW EDU 2025! We will host two sessions this year — both designed to strengthen the career-connected learning community and unlock insights and ideas that advance fulfilling career opportunities for learners around the country.

Birmingham emerged as the ideal location to launch the first regional Catalyze Challenge, embodying the transformative power of localized impact. These initiatives were so successful that Birmingham ran a second round of the challenge and recently announced grantees.

Educate Texas, a grantee from Round Three of the Catalyze Challenge, and Ascension Texas, a national hospital and healthcare system, have built an exemplary employer engagement model in Central Texas that connects high school students with real-world healthcare experiences, delivering impactful results for learners and the community as a whole.

Birmingham’s commitment to innovation and collaboration in the nonprofit sector shines once again with the announcement of the second round of winners for the Catalyze Birmingham Challenge.

When learners of all abilities have access to career-connected learning programs tailored to their specific needs, there is immense potential for traditionally underserved student populations to develop agency and embark on the first steps in their career journeys. The success of this targeted approach is evident at the Spring Valley School in Birmingham, Alabama.

In part three of this series, we dive into the importance of K-12 partnerships, which are pivotal in creating access to transformative career-connected learning opportunities and emphasize the growing importance of  K-12 collaborations alongside employer engagement in driving the movement’s success.

Employer engagement and industry partnerships are critical to the success of career-connected learning and its impact on students. We will highlight the importance of partnerships and employer engagement in career-connected learning, what is working well and where opportunities exist for deeper collaborations.