ADVANCE Career Accelerator Toolkit Now Available

In February 2021, the ADVANCE program launched the beta version of the ADVANCE Career Accelerator Toolkit (ACAT). ACAT provides students with salary and career information associated with ADVANCE pathways in the fields of Business & Hospitality Management, Health Sciences & Nursing, Information Technology & Computer Sciences, and Mathematics & Engineering. The goal of this resource is to help students better understand the impact of choosing a major by providing more granular data and the ability to compare career options. In addition to learning more about future career opportunities, students can review multiple Skills Roadmaps, i.e., visualizations of the skills they can expect to acquire as they work through coursework in particular ADVANCE majors. ACAT uses labor analytics to rank these skills by highest employer demand. This feature assists students with understanding the skills most needed for success in a chosen career field and how those skills relate to their coursework. While reviewing Skills Roadmaps and potential majors, students can select “favorites,” allowing them to save and compare different ADVANCE pathways in order to make well-informed decisions regarding their educational and career goals.

After a student enrolls in ADVANCE, their existing coursework (courses completed) is placed into a personalized ACAT account. This account gives a student access to a tracking system that demonstrates their progress toward career readiness through their updated personal Skills Roadmap. By tracking the student’s personalized Skills Roadmap, ACAT can produce a Skills Transcript to help ADVANCE students prepare for their job search and employer interviews. Analogous to an academic transcript, the Skills Transcript lists the students’ coursework, the skill(s) associated with their courses and notes relating to how the skill was applied in the course; all within a familiar and portable format.

We encourage you to browse through the ADVANCE Career Accelerator Toolkit and share the benefits associated with this resource with students.  

For more information, please contact, academics@nvcc.edu.

Submitted by:
Jennifer Nelson, Chief Transfer Officer, JLNelson@nvcc.edu