How to align curriculum development with future industry needs
Students, employers, and communities rely on educational institutions to prepare graduates for the labor market’s opportunities and demands. But this is challenging in a context where many industries are evolving more rapidly than ever before. To equip students for lasting success, higher education institutions must monitor trends and keep up with the latest innovations. This guide will help your institution take a future-facing approach to curriculum development.
Elevating program quality: Incorporating the latest industry insights, technologies, and best practices can enrich your program content. These up-to-date components should replace any outdated material.
Achieving and maintaining accreditation: Accreditation standards often have dimensions like student work readiness and continuous program improvement, which you can fulfill by regularly updating your curriculum to keep up with industry trends and innovations.
Improving student employability: When your students have the skills to meet both current and emerging industry demands, they become highly competitive in the job market. You can achieve this by identifying gaps between your current curriculum and the latest industry developments and introducing students to the practical skills and tools they need to close the gap. This can improve your graduate placement rate, which is a major mark of institutional success.
Enhancing institutional reputation: Future-facing curriculum development can enhance your institution’s reputation as one on the cutting edge of technological innovation and industry expertise. This reputation could help you attract prospective students and form industry partnerships.
Trends to watch for in curriculum development
As you monitor industry trends to address in your educational programs, each field will have its distinct developments each year. But four areas are rapidly evolving now and impacting virtually every industry. Keep an eye on trends in these areas for future-facing curriculum development:
Technological advancements: Advances in robotics, computing, integrated machinery, and other areas of technology are finding their way into many workplaces. Aim to identify relevant new technologies and give your students opportunities to learn about them and, where possible, practice using them.
Artificial intelligence (AI): Generative AI and machine learning can increasingly execute functions that formerly required human labor, from research and data analysis to programming and beyond. Students will benefit from encountering the latest models relevant to their field and honing the skills to leverage these effectively.
Sustainable practices: Across industries, more companies are focusing on their triple bottom line by considering the planet and people’s well-being along with profit. Your program can align with this trend by focusing on emerging sustainable practices and how the latest developments in clean energy could influence their chosen field.
Diversity and inclusion: While many companies across industries now prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion, regulatory trends in some locations are turning against affirmative action. Stay in touch with legal currents in your state to prepare students for workplaces adapting to these shifts.
12 Tips for future-facing curriculum development
Though industries progress in different ways and at different rates, a few best practices can help any program adapt and advance. These 12 tips will help you direct curriculum development toward emerging industry needs.
1. Conduct industry research
To align curriculum development with industry trends, you must first identify relevant trends in your field. You have several ways to keep your finger on the pulse of industry developments:
Networking with industry leaders: Attend industry events and build relationships with innovative industry leaders. These people can offer frontline insights about the job market, best practices, and technological advancements in their field. For example, if a forward-looking industry leader shares about a new tool they are about to introduce at their facilities, you could incorporate an introduction to that tool at a relevant point in your curriculum.
Following industry content: Subscribe to industry magazines, newsletters, and social media feeds that share updates about the evolving industry landscape. Encourage all contributors to your curriculum development process to read the latest releases and share their takeaways.
Reviewing industry reports: Industry and market reports include valuable expert insights and predictions about the industry’s direction. Subscriptions to these could be worth adding to your department’s budget.
Tracking market data: Leverage labor market data analytics in your curriculum review to ensure your program teaches the knowledge, competencies, and soft skills to meet growing industry appetites. Integrating market data software into your review helps you access and apply these insights faster.
2. Engage with stakeholders and gather feedback
Stakeholders in your program include students, faculty, alumni, employers, and community members. Each party has valuable perspectives to share that can help inform program development. For example, surveying employed alumni can reveal which emerging industry developments they would have liked the program to prepare them for, and which current components are becoming less relevant.
With their research expertise and pedagogical experience, your faculty can offer keen insights into technical innovations and how to integrate new components into the curriculum effectively.
3. Monitor emerging technologies
During your ongoing industry research, keep an eye on technological innovations and updates workplaces are adopting. If your graduates will use these technologies in the workplace, learning about them as part of your program is a significant advantage.
Aim to at least introduce important new technologies to students in instructional content. But wherever possible, especially if those technologies could be prominent in their work duties, it’s ideal to create a more practical encounter. Ways to do this include:
Giving students direct access to the technology for individual or group projects.
Inviting an industry professional to demonstrate the technology in class or during a facility tour.
Using interactive videos, models, or virtual reality to present the technology.
4. Review assessment methods
Every program review should consider assessment methods, especially when focusing on future industry needs. Examine whether your assessments test the key concepts and competencies your students need to master, or whether another approach would do more to evaluate and enhance their job readiness. Students who excel at your assessments should have a firm grasp of the current state of the industry and its trajectory.
Aim for a balance of summative assessments to check work readiness and formative assessments to improve it. Both these types can fit within a sustainable assessment approach that prepares students for lifelong learning and professional development.
5. Prioritize accreditation standards
Higher education accreditation standards help guide curriculum development to ensure your program remains credible and relevant. If your program is eligible for accreditation from multiple bodies, prioritize an accreditation with a prestigious reputation in your industry and a focus on student work readiness and continuous improvement.
Accreditors stake their reputation on accrediting high-quality programs that serve their industry’s needs. To achieve this, they stay in touch with industry leaders and market data. Pursuing and maintaining an industry-focused accreditation status for your program will keep it aligned with job marketplace priorities.
6. Use curriculum mapping
Curriculum mapping allows you to set up a semester-long learning plan. A curriculum map aims to plan the sequence of lessons to maximize student understanding. This involves grouping related concepts and building complex ideas on simpler foundations. Administrators, faculty, and support staff can collaborate on this process, and student survey feedback is invaluable in refining your curriculum maps.
Enhanced student comprehension through effective curriculum sequencing.
Reference points for learning outcomes achieved compared to the intended progress plan.
Transparent learning objectives for improved student engagement.
7. Align learning outcomes
The learning outcomes you set for your students to achieve will shape their focus and competencies. Ensure these are aligned with the industry’s trajectory by considering:
Technical skills: Your learning outcomes should ensure that every graduate has the skills and knowledge the industry needs today and those necessary to keep pace with emerging developments.
Soft skills: Teamwork, problem-solving, communication, and other soft skills are pivotal in hiring decisions for 93 percent of employers. Incorporate these into your learning outcomes to ensure students intentionally develop them.
Curriculum mapping: Use the curriculum map to ensure you introduce concepts at the right time for students to build understanding and achieve all learning outcomes.
Assignments: Along with testing learning outcomes, your projects, tasks, and other assignments should help students practice the competencies they’ll need in their future workplaces.
8. Integrate soft skills
While ever-evolving, industry-specific skills, and technical knowledge are a significant part of future-facing curriculum development, soft skills remain a decisive factor in student employability. Developing these skills should remain a core priority of your program that you consolidate while updating technical content. As machinery and computing take over a greater share of operations in most industries, a graduate’s soft skills become a more prominent part of their value proposition to potential employers. Some of the most sought-after soft skills in innovative workplaces include:
Problem-solving abilities
Adaptability
Time-management
Creativity
Communication skills
Collaboration across diversity
Leadership
9. Embrace continuous improvement
Adapting your curriculum to future industry needs requires a framework for continuous improvement. Regular program review is essential to any framework for keeping your program at the field’s cutting edge. For efficient program review, use a centralized software system for program data collection and analysis. Integrating this system with your market data analysis tool allows you to identify opportunities for improvement to address the latest trends and innovations. Student survey feedback and engagement with other stakeholders will also help guide continuous program improvement.
This process of data collection and analysis can continue throughout the year, culminating in formal mid-semester and annual program reviews. At least annually, incorporate insights into your program to ensure it remains relevant.
10. Form industry partnerships
Each department in your educational institution should build and maintain industry partnerships. These relationships give programs a living link from the classroom to the professional world. Industry partners can contribute to curriculum development by commenting on whether your program aligns with the industry’s trajectory and how it could better do so. They can also propose hands-on learning experiences to enhance employability and provide an accurate assessment of how work-ready your graduates are.
To enhance your curriculum through future-facing industry partnerships:
Identify potential partners from a relevant industry who align with your values.
Define the partnership’s scope, from informal networking to guest lectures and internship opportunities.
Integrate their contributions into the curriculum and evaluate the results.
Maintain and improve the relationship.
11. Emphasize practical teaching approaches
A future-facing curriculum equips faculty to use innovative and practical teaching methods that prepare students for industry applications of the concepts they learn in class. As industries reward technical precision in using the latest technologies and procedures, bridging the gap between theory and practice becomes increasingly vital. Ways to enhance your program’s practicality include:
Project-based learning: Create learning experiences in which your students investigate an industry-relevant problem, develop a potential solution, and reflect on their solution’s effectiveness. Project-based learning often incorporates group assignments along with individual tasks. This approach builds soft skills like problem-solving and communication while providing practical experience.
Student internships: Internships allow your students to immerse themselves in a real work environment to observe and practice the skills they are learning. To get the best results from an internship, identify an innovative employer willing to give your students some hands-on practice.
Extended reality: Virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies are powerful practical learning tools. While expense, scarcity, and safety sometimes place physical limits on practical learning opportunities like handling the latest machines, extended reality lessons can transcend these limitations. For example, a teacher could take students on a virtual reality tour of a high-tech engineering facility equipped with the latest advances in robotics.
12. Leverage curriculum management software
Curriculum review and development is a multifaceted and challenging process, but the right tools can streamline your workflow as you keep your program aligned with evolving industry needs. Cutting-edge curriculum management software can help you:
View market data insights within your curriculum review tool to ensure alignment.
Compare student learning outcomes with accreditation standards.
Support collaboration between faculty and monitor progress from a centralized dashboard.
Evolve your curriculum with Watermark
Choosing the right curriculum management software can save you time during your program review and improve your ability to track and serve evolving industry needs. With Watermark Curriculum Strategy, you can:
Build visual proposal and approval workflows for curriculum changes.
Incorporate survey feedback to inform curriculum development.
Integrate with your strategic information system (SIS), our accreditation Watermark Planning & Self-Study solution, and Lightcast labor market data.
Contact us for a free demo to learn more about how Curriculum Strategy can streamline future-facing curriculum development.
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