Workforce
Alignment
engine

The Need. Academic programs frequently struggle to keep pace with the rapidly evolving demands of today’s workforce, especially in critical fields like frontline management. Outdated curricula, limited career readiness initiatives, and a lack of alignment with industry standards contribute to persistent skills gaps. As a result, students often graduate underprepared for practical, real-world roles.

 

Higher education professionals face a related challenge: without access to timely, actionable insights on student outcomes, time-to-completion, learner feedback, and evolving market needs, it becomes difficult to make informed curricular improvements. This gap leaves institutions unable to adequately prepare learners for modern job markets, affecting both career readiness and long-term workforce success.

 

There was a clear opportunity to create a tool that could bridge the gap between academic programming and industry expectations by providing dynamic, data-driven recommendations.

The Solution. Team CAI’s PathwayPro™ was developed to directly address this need. Built on BrightHive’s multi-agent framework, PathwayPro™ is an AI-powered bot that uses skills gaps to align academic programs with real-world workforce requirements, focusing on frontline management competencies.

By analyzing institutional Student Information System (SIS) data—such as graduation outcomes, time-to-completion metrics, and learner feedback—PathwayPro™ identifies skill gaps within programs. It then recommends curricular adjustments to better equip students for success. Additionally, the tool compares program competencies against up-to-date industry standards, delivering targeted, actionable suggestions to ensure graduates leave with the most relevant skills possible.

 

With BrightHive’s powerful data engine as its backbone, PathwayPro™ transforms institutional data into strategic insights, empowering administrators and program leaders to make evidence-based curricular changes that align more closely with workforce demands.

 

Setting the Vision & Expectations: At the outset, I led the development of a comprehensive project plan to clearly define deliverables and gain stakeholder buy-in. Setting clear expectations early encouraged a collaborative, agile workflow. The project team was tasked with user-testing the BrightHive platform, with a specific focus on pressure-testing both the tool’s capabilities and our operational processes.

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Level-Setting Across Teams: I led the  project Kick-Off where team roles were clarified via a RASCI framework. We conducted a market and landscape analysis through a formal Statement of Analysis (SOA) and ran an ideation session to brainstorm BrightHive’s most impactful use case. Through this collaboration, we decided to design and pressure-test a platform use-case centered around skills gap analysis for frontline management.

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Key questions guiding this phase included:

• What can and can’t the platform do?

• Who is the primary user audience?

• Who are the secondary impacted audiences?

• How useful are the platform’s outputs for real-world solutions?

 

User-Testing and Feature Development: The team conducted a robust usability testing cycle, documenting platform features, limitations, and areas for improvement. We completed a draft Usability Testing Report, detailing insights that would directly inform feature adaptations.

Following testing, we shifted into customized development. We designed a custom agent within BrightHive to target program administrators and academic leadership as key users. We then collaboratively designed a clean, user-friendly interface tailored to these audiences.

Building the MVP and Go-to-Market Strategy:
Our team successfully built a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), alongside a full pilot strategy, a pitch deck for internal and external stakeholders, and a go-to-market and business plan.

 

Thanks to a clear vision, rapid iteration, and close collaboration across roles, PathwayPro™ was completed within our ambitious six-week timeline. The product was ultimately recognized with awards and commendations for its execution, innovative design, and real-world impact on academic-to-workforce alignment.