Case Studies
Real Workforce Questions.
Real Program Answers.
Unexpected Striking Insights
CASE STUDY 1: Who Should Count in Your Job Placement Rates?
Challenge: An Automotive Technology program wanted to know how many of its students were enrolled to prepare for an automotive career, and how many were taking courses primarily as hobbyists to pursue personal interests. Their existing reporting system only looked at graduates and treated all students the same, regardless of whether they ever intended to pursue a career in the workforce.
Solution: Workforce Results not only answered that question but also enabled the program to filter out hobbyists from its workforce analyses, resulting in more accurate job placement rates and employment outcomes. Many career education programs serve students with different goals. Some enroll to prepare for employment, while others participate for personal interest, skill building, or other reasons. The Workforce Results System™ can identify these groups and enable programs to analyze workforce outcomes using the population that best aligns with their reporting and improvement goals.
Lessons Learned:
Standardized job placement metrics can obscure your real results—especially when they don’t distinguish between hobbyists and career‑focused students.
CASE STUDY 2: Which Students Are Ready for Internships?
Challenge: An Automotive Technology program wanted an easier way to identify when students were eligible for internships and to manage the internship experience more effectively.
Solution: Some of the ways the customized system helped the program included:
Identifying students who were ready for internships.
Tracking whether scheduled check-ins with students and industry liaisons had been completed.
Monitoring whether students reported meeting their internship learning goals.
Comparing internship experiences with ASE standards and program curriculum to strengthen employer partnerships and improve student learning.
Lessons Learned:
Internships produce better outcomes when programs have a system to identify student readiness, monitor progress, and strengthen employer partnerships.
CASE STUDY 3: Unexpected Insights - What Surprised One Automotive Program
Challenge: An Automotive Technology program believed that only a small percentage of its current students were already working in the automotive industry while attending school.
Unexpected Insights: The Workforce Results survey revealed that approximately 40% of current student respondents were already employed in automotive-related positions. This insight changed the program's understanding of its students and highlighted the importance of measuring workforce outcomes for both current students and graduates—not just graduates after program completion.
Lessons Learned:
Programs often discover their most valuable workforce insights by collecting data they never thought to measure.
These are just a few examples.
Every Workforce Results System™ is customized to answer the workforce questions that matter most to your program.
© 2026 Donna Milgram. All rights reserved.
The Workforce Results System™ helps Career Education programs answer workforce questions that existing data can't answer.
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