A conversation with leaders from two N.C. community colleges — Forsyth Technical Community College and Alamance Community College — on connecting learning, skills, and economic mobility.
What does it take to make the skills learners build in college visible, trusted, and useful beyond the classroom?
In Education Design Lab’s Sept. 29, 2026, webinar, “How to Create a Culture of Skills Visibility,” leaders from Forsyth Technical Community College and Alamance Community College shared how they are shifting from thinking about education as a linear path to a degree toward designing connected, career-aligned learning journeys that recognize what learners can do along the way.
The conversation featured Dr. Janet Spriggs, president of Forsyth Tech; Dr. Paula Dibley, Forsyth Tech’s chief student success officer and chief of staff; Dr. Ken Ingle, president of Alamance Community College; and Dr. Justin Snyder, Alamance’s senior vice president of student learning and workforce development. Together, they offered a candid look at the strategic, operational, and cultural work required to make skills a throughline across an institution.
Watch the full webinar recording above.
Skills visibility is about economic mobility
For the panelists, skills visibility is not simply a new way to describe coursework or issue more credentials. It is an economic-mobility strategy.
“At Forsyth Tech, I think about skills-based education as beginning with a pretty fundamental basic question: What does the learner know, and what can they actually do?” said Spriggs. “And can we validate that and communicate it in a way that has meaning that’s beyond our institution?”
That question is expanding the definition of success. Rather than treating completion as the finish line, both colleges are looking beyond graduation or credential attainment to ask what happens next: Does the credential lead somewhere of value? Can learners describe the skills they developed? Do they have a next step toward work, advancement, or additional education?
As Spriggs put it, the goal is to avoid creating “an educational cul-de-sac.” Learners need pathways that allow them to enter, earn a credential of value, work, return, continue learning, and advance over time.
Speak a shared language
The webinar highlighted a familiar challenge for many colleges: employers often talk about skills, while institutions more often use terms like competencies, learning outcomes, and course requirements.
Those vocabularies are related, but they do not always communicate the same thing to learners or employers. Snyder described the issue plainly: A course title may make sense inside a college, but it does not necessarily tell an employer what a learner can do.
“We talk about our programs in terms of courses,” Snyder said. “But what does that mean for an employer?”
The work, he said, is to move beyond course names and make outcomes clear: What does a learner know? What can they do because of a learning experience? And how can that evidence be communicated in a language employers recognize?
The Lab’s Skills Visibility Cycle offers one framework for this work: define skills clearly; give learners opportunities to develop them; validate demonstrated mastery; document the evidence; and communicate it in forms learners, employers, and other decision-makers can understand and use.
Make skills a campus-wide practice
Creating a culture of skills visibility requires more than adding a new statement to a strategic plan. It requires changing how people across the college work together.
At Alamance, the college’s “All In” strategy brought more than 120 faculty and staff members into cross-functional task forces focused on integrated pathways, learner journeys, process improvement, and single points of entry. Those groups included faculty, staff, administrators, students, and employer partners.
“We couldn’t do it in our silos,” said Snyder. “This is something that has to be truly college-wide.”
Forsyth Tech described a similar shift: faculty are naming the skills embedded in assignments and learning experiences, documenting them, and making sure learners understand how they connect to work and future advancement. Advisors and student-services teams also play an essential role by helping learners see how courses, credentials, prior experience, and work-based learning fit into a longer-term career journey.
“The culture really ends up being sort of those 1,000 micro-decisions and habits that our team members are making on a daily basis,” Dibley said.
Build with employers, not just for them
Both colleges emphasized that employer partnership must go beyond occasional advisory meetings or end-stage program review. Trust grows through regular, reciprocal engagement — and through inviting employers into the design process from the beginning.
“You can’t call someone twice and consider it dating,” Snyder said. “You can’t just call that employer twice and consider it a relationship.”
At Alamance, that means bringing employers into pathway design and creating early connections between students and potential employers. Through its Project Next Step work, the college is seeking to connect learners with employment or transfer outcomes during their first semester. In HVAC, for example, students meet regional employers within weeks of beginning the program through an “employer speed dating” event.
Forsyth Tech has moved from a traditional advisory-board model toward Business and Industry Leadership Teams that engage employers upstream — before a program or pathway is fully designed. Through a partnership with Reynolds American, Forsyth Tech and the employer co-designed interconnected pathways that support entry-level hiring, employee retention, career advancement, apprenticeships, and continued education.
When employers see their “fingerprints” on a pathway from the start, Spriggs said, they are more likely to trust its value and invest in learners’ progress.
Redesign for the learner journey
The panelists were candid about the barriers to this work. Many colleges still operate through structures that separate credit and noncredit education, workforce programs, student services, advising, and career development — even though learners do not experience their lives or goals in those categories.
A working adult may need a short-term credential today, work tomorrow, receive credit for prior learning, and complete an associate degree years later. That is one journey, even if the institution has historically treated each step as separate.
“It’s our job, I think, to build those seamless, connected pathways for our students,” Spriggs said.
That work includes recognizing learning that happened before a learner arrives at the college — through military experience, prior certifications, work, or short-term training — and building flexible systems for credit for prior learning.
It also means responding to emerging needs. At Forsyth Tech, for example, AI fluency has become an additional competency. The challenge is to define a baseline that every learner needs while recognizing that AI skills will look different across industries and occupations.
The work ahead
Skills visibility is not a one-time project, a badge, or a new label for existing programs. It is an ongoing institutional practice: listening to learners and employers, clarifying what skills mean in context, building evidence of mastery, and creating pathways that lead to real opportunity.
The discussion made one point clear: Community colleges are uniquely positioned to serve as translators and connectors among learners, employers, and regional economies. But doing so requires colleges to rethink not only what they teach, but how they organize, partner, measure success, and communicate the value of learning.
