Improve Curriculum Alignment in Higher Education with Labor Market Insight

As concerns about the cost of higher ed continue to rise and the job market remains tight, it’s more important than ever for higher education institutions to demonstrate their value to students. In fact, data from Pew Research shows that 29% of U.S. adults surveyed say that the cost of a four-year college degree isn’t worth it, while an additional 47% say a four-year degree is only worth it if they don’t have to take out loans. 

To attract new students and retain them through graduation amid these challenges, higher education institutions need to offer the right courses, experiences, resources, and curriculum for students to achieve successful career outcomes. One way to do this is by taking a thoughtful approach to curriculum alignment. 

To set students (and your institution) up for success, learn more about what curriculum alignment is, its associated benefits and challenges, and the best practices for developing a future-ready curriculum — including the importance of using skills and labor market data.

What is Curriculum Alignment? 

Curriculum alignment is the strategic process of ensuring a school or educational institution’s curriculum, teaching methods, and resources support key learning outcomes. The goal of curriculum alignment is to enable students to have the best opportunities to learn efficiently and succeed both academically and professionally. 

There are several kinds of alignment, each with a different emphasis:

Horizontal Alignment

This approach focuses on aligning learning across different courses within the same program or department with the goal of ensuring a consistent and well-rounded learning experience for students.

Vertical Alignment

This process involves aligning learning across different levels within a program, such as  introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses to enable students to have a clear progression of knowledge and skills.

External alignment

This type of alignment takes the needs and expectations of external stakeholders into account, such as employers, professional organizations, and accrediting decision makers.

While higher ed has traditionally emphasized horizontal and vertical alignment, external alignment to labor market trends has become increasingly important in light of learner’s focus on career outcomes. In this article, we’ll focus on this latter kind of alignment and the ways in which it can unlock value for learners and institutions alike.

Why Effective Curriculum Alignment is Important 

Curriculum alignment is essential to offering students the education and resources they need to secure employment and achieve positive career outcomes. An effective strategy is especially important given today’s competitive job market and rapidly evolving in-demand skills. 

According to a survey conducted by Modern Campus, 66% of students ages 18 to 24 feel unprepared for future careers. Effective curriculum alignment takes the latest labor market and skills data into consideration to equip students with the skills they will need as they begin their careers. 

Specific benefits of curriculum alignment include: 

• Improved student achievement by creating clear, consistent learning pathways

• Helping educational institutions identify and address potential learning gaps

• Implementing teaching methods and practices that match assessment strategies

• Enabling more targeted and efficient instruction for students across programs

• Better equipping students for career success following graduation 

Challenges in Curriculum Alignment

Understanding and addressing challenges in curriculum alignment can help your institution address roadblocks and maximize the benefits of effective alignment. 

Common curriculum alignment challenges include: 

• Misalignment and miscommunication across academic departments, faculty and administrative staff, and institutions or external partners 

• Lacking a standardized process for curriculum alignment

• Striking the right balance between meeting standardized requirements and individual student needs

• Managing resource constraints to allow time, bandwidth, and budget for regular curriculum review

• Tracking the latest labor market and skills data and trends 

• Keeping pace with evolving educational standards

• Addressing and adapting to diverse student learning styles

Best Practices for Successful Curriculum Alignment

The following best practices can help your educational institution implement a successful, comprehensive curriculum alignment strategy. 

1. Regularly Review Your Curriculum

Schedule regular curriculum audits, such as annually or semiannually, to identify areas of the curriculum that require updates to align with the latest student learning needs, labor market trends, in-demand skills, and other criteria.

During this process, review both predetermined learning objectives and student performance data to spot alignment issues or areas for improvement. Using this information, update learning goals, course content, program offerings, and teaching methods to ensure your curriculum prepares students for successful academic and professional careers. 

2. Encourage Collaboration

Because one of the top challenges is misalignment and miscommunication, strong collaboration across stakeholders is essential to successful curriculum alignment. For example, faculty and administrative staff across departments should work together to identify challenges, potential overlap, and gaps. A key ingredient in collaboration is also gathering and implementing student and alumni feedback to understand how the curriculum may not be meeting students’ needs. 

3. Track Assessment and Evaluation Effectiveness

Based on the learning objectives you set as part of your curriculum alignment, make sure any assessments or student evaluations directly test for and measure key objectives. Use diverse evaluation methods — such as standardized tests, open-ended essays, presentations, and experiential learning to capture different aspects of student learning. Also implement a standardized process to track competency and hold students accountable to achieving learning objectives. Alumni career outcomes data can further validate the effectiveness of your programs in preparing students for relevant career pathways.

4. Use Curriculum Alignment Maps and Other Documentation

A curriculum alignment map is a spreadsheet, database, or other tool that documents the relationship between curriculum components, objectives, and student learning outcomes. Centralizing and counting this information can help your institution make more streamlined, consistent decisions related to curriculum alignment. 

When you create a curriculum alignment map, use standardized templates to ensure effective coverage of all program elements such as, course sequences and prerequisites, learning objectives for each course, assessment methods, program-level outcomes, and skills and competencies covered. Software tools, like Skillabi, can help you align program learning outcomes to in-demand skills and industry needs, simplifying program review while enhancing program-to-career alignment.

5. Use Technology To Track Skills and Labor Market Data 

As you continue to adapt and align curriculum at your organization, tracking the latest skills and labor market data is critical to ensuring your curriculum contributes to positive career outcomes for students. Because market demands and in-demand skills evolve rapidly, your Institution should continually analyze labor market data, employment trends, and student outcome metrics to ensure the curriculum remains relevant. This data should inform regular updates to course content and learning objectives.

Data-Driven Tools for Curriculum Alignment

Lightcast is a global leader in labor market analytics and offers several solutions to help you more effectively align curriculum and equip students for successful careers in today’s dynamic business landscape. 

With Lightcast Analyst, your institution can access all the economic and workforce data you need to validate successful programs, identify at-risk programs, and leverage the latest market insight to connect students with great careers. Our student retention solutions enable your institution to use labor market data to show how the skills students are learning match with their future careers, which can improve student engagement. And, as you take an ongoing approach to curriculum alignment, Lightcast’s program demand gap analysis helps you see how your academic programs meet job market demand.

Case Study: How Gies College of Business Uses Lightcast for Graduate Certificate Curriculum Alignment

The University of Illinois Gies College of Business is consistently ranked as a top business school in the U.S. for its innovative programs and the high ROI it delivers to students. In large part, this success stems from delivering offerings that expand access to business education and drive value for students by guiding them toward relevant, in-demand career paths. 

Gies recently turned to Lightcast data to support two significant projects, including developing and marketing new graduate certificates in areas like financial management. These certificates aim to support both learners looking to upskill in their current role as well as those looking to reskill into a new field. To achieve these goals, Gies needed to align curriculum with in-demand skills and high-growth careers. The team used job posting data from Lightcast Analyst to understand and highlight labor market demand for each graduate certificate and the skills taught in those credentials.

Lightcast’s Career Pathways insights also helped the Gies communications team target their online marketing campaigns towards working professionals with an opportunity to upskill. Using Lightcast data, Gies highlighted common career paths, the skill gaps between positions, and how a graduate certificate could close the gap. The campaign drove a higher click-through rate than other typical marketing campaigns the team previously launched.  

Finally, the team used Lightcast data to script recruitment webinars, preview the curriculum and experience that learners receive from Gies, and show how graduate certificates can close specific skills gaps a learner might have. According to Chera LaForge (Educational Portfolio Senior Associate Manager at Gies College of Business), “Without access to Lightcast data, we wouldn’t have been able to provide this rich context to internal partners and our potential learners.”

Lightcast Can Support Your Curriculum Alignment Goals 

Rather than being a one-and-done task, curriculum alignment is an ongoing process that requires refinement and improvement over time. By proactively pursuing alignment and connection between curriculum, instruction, resources, and assessment, your institution can improve alumni career outcomes and attract and retain new students as a result.

As you look to implement more effective curriculum-to-career alignment at your institution, Lightcast is here to help. We partner with more than 1,000 colleges, universities, and education technology companies to ensure students’ educational experiences set them up for promising, realistic career opportunities.

Learn more about our data solutions for higher education or reach out to connect with a member of our team and discuss your specific goals. 

To learn more about trends affecting the global labor market like AI, labor shortages, and geopolitics, read our latest research, Fault Lines.