CWP Workshop 2025

Career and Workforce Preparation Topical Module Support

In partnership with the Lumina Foundation, NSSE has launched a new initiative to support institutions with Career and Workforce Preparation (CWP) Topical Module data and results. Here you will find a sequence of short tutorials and reflective exercises to guide you on your journey to make the most out of your NSSE CWP administration. We welcome participation from a variety of faculty and staff at each institution including institutional research staff, career services staff, and faculty involved in this work to join us.

This sequence of activities is designed to help you work through the process of asking questions and providing evidence to support and improve student career and workforce preparation and to achieve your goals for participating in the CWP Topical Module. NSSE staff welcome ideas for additional supports and resources to continue helping institutions further their work understanding their student engagement with career and workforce preparation activities. If you have other ideas for how we can support your work, let us know!

A Step-by-Step CWP Journey

I. Campus Action Plan

This resource guides you through steps for planning your CWP initiative, implementing your plans, taking action on your results, and reflecting on the entire process. These guiding questions will get you started on your CWP journey and will be referenced throughout the rest of the resources below. Review these questions and keep them in mind as you view the next step in our sequence, a tutorial for starting your action plan.

Campus Action Plan (coming soon)

II. Starting Your Action Plan

In this tutorial, we discuss strategies for exploring your goals for having participated in the CWP Topical Module and ideas for identifying key stakeholders on your campus. Creating a plan that focuses on your institution's career and workforce preparation practices and needs as well as your intended audience can greatly contribute to the success of your overall action plan.

Watch now (coming soon)

View slides (coming soon)

III. Exploring Your CWP Data and Results

In this tutorial, we walk our viewers through the process of asking questions for further exploration and using the NSSE-provided reports and respondent-level data file to explore CWP Topical Module findings. These starter tips include ideas about assessing data quality, resources for connecting findings to audiences, suggestions for the kinds of questions to ask, and cautions about how to use variables in your data file. Participants will leave with a foundation for beginning their in-depth exploration of CWP findings. Be sure to complete the accompanying homework assignment before moving on to the next step in the sequence!

Watch now

View slides

Homework (coming soon)

IV. Turning Your Plan Into Action

In our next tutorial, we quickly review your data and results exploration and then introduce approaches to turn your plan into action by describing examples of CWP data in action at several institutions.  We then discuss types of action, and consider next steps for reporting, disseminating and strengthening evidence through data integration. We then invite you to reflect on your experiences to support your initiatives and your future administrations of the CWP Topical Module.

Watch now

View slides

V. Personalized Consultations

After completing the sequence of tutorials and finalizing your Campus Action Plan, we look forward to scheduling personalized consultations to help participants reach their goals and share their experiences. When you're ready for the final phase of your CWP journey, let us know!

A More Condensed Path

If you already feel well prepared to explore your CWP data and results, you may find it useful to view our crash course on making the best use of your CWP administration. This workshop, originally presented in February 2025, is a more condensed overview of the sequence above. 

Watch now

View slides

Key takeaways from participants include the following:

  • Most participants joining the CWP workshop were looking to advance their knowledge about how to use their CWP data and results to enact institutional change as it pertained to career resources and support for their students.
  • CWP workshop participants are actively working to integrate their CWP data and results into practice, integrating results to strategic planning, quality enhancement planning, and with other student engagement and success measures.
  • CWP Workshop participants expressed some interests in exploring how to connect their CWP data to other data and database sources, such as the Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE) and Quality Enhancement Planning databases.
  • Workshop participants also discussed how support from institutional actors factors into integration and dissemination of CWP data and results across campuses.