Beyond Retention: Building a Culture of Workforce Completion and Career Success

Recently, the U.S. Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Education released America’s Talent Strategy: Building the Workforce for the Golden Age, outlining a unified national approach to workforce education. For colleges, this vision translates into a renewed urgency to align instruction, credentials, and completion with the evolving needs of employers and learners alike.

This federal vision highlights workforce development centered on:

• Industry-driven pathways aligned with high-demand jobs

• Expansion of apprenticeships and work-based learning

• AI literacy and rapid reskilling

• Integrated systems that remove silos

• Outcome-focused accountability

Several states have echoed this call with bold visions for 2030 and beyond to prepare students for high-value careers in advanced industries, healthcare, and emerging technologies.

To deliver on these ambitious goals, colleges must look beyond traditional measures of student success. The future depends not just on who enrolls, but on who completes, and whether those completions translate to meaningful careers.

The Core Challenge: Move Beyond Retention to Completion

Despite decades of effort, national completion rates at two-year colleges remain stubbornly low. Nationally, only 34% of first-time, full-time students in career and technical education (CTE) programs complete a credential within 150% of the expected time, a rate that has barely shifted in more than a decade.

For years, colleges have invested heavily in retention strategies- learning communities, extended orientations, and wraparound services inspired by Vincent Tinto’s framework. While these supports have value, they haven’t produced the large-scale gains in completion that the workforce demands. The next leap forward requires colleges to focus on what happens in the learning experience itself and to remove structural barriers that prevent students from finishing.

The Human Leverage Point: Empowering Workforce Faculty

Workforce faculty are at the center of this mission. They connect classrooms to careers and translate curriculum into real-world skills. Most come directly from industry, bringing deep technical expertise and current knowledge of their fields. However, many enter higher education with little formal preparation in teaching or student engagement. That’s not a shortcoming; it’s an opportunity for colleges to invest in translating industry know-how into effective learning experiences.

When colleges provide training in pedagogy, curriculum design, and inclusive teaching practices, they empower faculty to reach more students and elevate program quality.

Equally important, colleges should ensure that workforce faculty are included in key planning discussions, from scheduling to program design, so their expertise informs institutional decisions that affect completion.

Institutional Practices That Promote Completion

While faculty development drives instructional quality, institutional systems determine whether students persist. Colleges can advance completion by rethinking policies and practices that shape access and progression. Colleges can remove structural barriers and strengthen completion through three key practices:

1. Expand Night and Weekend Offerings: Nearly three-quarters of two-year college students work part-time or full-time while attending classes. Many are employed in jobs related to their field of study. Yet upper-level or advanced courses are often scheduled only during the day, limiting access for working students. Expanding flexible scheduling helps students persist through to completion.

   
   

2. Rethink Course Cancellation Policies: Common scheduling policies often cancel classes with less than 10-15 students enrolled. While that may be practical for general education courses, it can derail progress in workforce programs where sequential or capstone courses are offered only once a year. Allowing critical low-enrollment courses to run ensures that small cohorts can still graduate on time.

   
   

3. Strengthen Program-Specific Advising: Students in workforce programs benefit from advisors who understand program structures, prerequisites, and career pathways. Colleges should invest in specialized advising roles and foster strong partnerships between advisors and faculty to ensure students receive accurate, timely guidance from enrollment through completion.

Each of these practices represents a practical way to turn retention efforts into measurable completion gains.

A Call to Action: Building a Future of Completion and Career Mobility

Federal and state funding priorities increasingly reward workforce programs that not only enroll students but also ensure they complete credentials leading to sustainable careers. To meet this moment, colleges must translate policy ambition, national and state workforce goals and accountability mandatesinto practical, scalable action on their campuses.

That means equipping faculty, especially those with deep industry expertise, with the tools and confidence to teach effectively, while reimagining institutional systems to remove barriers that slow completion. Success will depend on aligning teaching, scheduling, and advising with the lived realities of today’s learners.

The path to true completion begins in the classroom, where empowered faculty transform instruction, and data-driven systems support every learner’s progress from enrollment to employment. When colleges teach, plan, and lead with completion in mind, they don’t just meet workforce goals, they build thriving communities and economic mobility that endures.