Written By: Ginger Ontiveros, President & Chief Executive Officer

Why Mindset Is the Missing Link in Work-Based Learning and What We’re Doing About It

A few years ago, I hired a college intern to work with me.

She handed me a resume that looked like most students’: a few campus activities, some general experience, nothing that immediately stood out. During the interview, I asked her to walk me through how she might contribute to the work of the nonprofit I was leading at the time.

She struggled to point to anything concrete.

But something about her stood out to me, so I kept digging.

Eventually, she mentioned that she had recently planned a baby shower for a friend.

So I shifted the conversation.

I asked her how she approached it; how she decided what to include, how she thought about the audience, how she handled logistics. As she walked me through it, something became clear: she wasn’t just describing a party. She was describing a process.

She talked about anticipating guest needs. About coordinating details. About sending thank-you notes; something many people overlook entirely. There was intentionality in how she approached the experience.

So I kept probing.

That’s when I learned she had been doing this regularly for her sorority. Planning events, organizing people, managing moving parts.

She had real experience. She just didn’t know how to name it. I hired her on the spot. That moment came back to me recently as our team at Tomorrow’s Talent made a critical shift in how we think about preparing students for the world of work.

For years, like many organizations in this space, we focused on building pipelines and creating sequences of experiences designed to move students toward deeper engagement with employers. Internships. Apprenticeships. Structured, high-commitment opportunities.

And those still matter. But we began to recognize something we had been overlooking: Students don’t need to wait for a “big” opportunity to demonstrate value. They are often already developing meaningful skills through smaller, less formal experiences that never make it onto a resume. That realization led us to reframe our work around a central idea we now call Resume Worthy Experiences™. Not as a replacement for traditional work-based learning but as a way to expand it.

Not as a replacement for traditional work-based learning but as a way to expand it.

Because Resume Worthy Experiences can take many forms. Yes, they can be internships or apprenticeships and these remain a big part of what we do.

But they can also be:

• A collaborative project solving a real problem for a local business

• A short-term engagement that produces a tangible deliverable

• A student-led initiative that requires planning, communication, and execution

What matters is not the duration. What matters is whether the experience produces evidence of value. This shift required a mindset change, first for us, and then for the educators and employers we work with.

We had to move from asking: “How do we build the perfect pipeline?”

to asking: “How do we create meaningful, resume-worthy value right now?”

That shift changes everything. It lowers the barrier for employer engagement. It makes it easier to get started. And it allows more students to access experiences that help them stand out, not someday, but immediately. And importantly, it changes how students see themselves.

When a student can point to something real; something they created, contributed to, or improved; they begin to understand their own value in a different way.

But here’s what we’ve learned along the way: These shifts don’t happen because of new programs alone. They happen because of new perspectives.

Across the country, there is increasing urgency around preparing students for a workforce that values applied skills as much as academic knowledge. At the same time, employers continue to report difficulty finding candidates who can demonstrate those skills in practice.

That gap isn’t just structural. It’s perceptual.

When educators begin to see smaller experiences as meaningful… When employers realize engagement doesn’t have to start with a full internship… When systems shift from tracking participation to recognizing value creation… Momentum builds.

We’ve seen that momentum start with what I often think of as a coalition of the willing.

A handful of educators willing to challenge traditional assumptions. To try something different. To rethink what counts as meaningful experience.

And when they do, others don’t need to be convinced. They just need to see what’s possible. That’s also why professional learning matters so much in this work. Because shifting mindset, especially within established systems, doesn’t happen by accident. It requires exposure to new ideas. Space to reflect. And support to translate insight into action.

We’ve seen firsthand how powerful this can be, not just in theory, but in practice.

That belief is what led us to partner with Catapult Masterclasses.

Their approach to professional development is grounded in something we’ve come to value deeply: mindset as the foundation for meaningful change.

Rather than delivering disconnected trainings, Catapult brings educators into a cohort-based experience designed to move from insight to action combining thought leadership, reflection, and practical application over time.

And the impact is tangible. In external evaluations, over 97% of participants reported feeling more prepared to implement institutional change, and nearly 90% saw passive support shift into active commitment within their organizations.

That matters.

Because if we want to expand access to high-quality work-based learning, and Resume Worthy Experiences at scale, we have to invest not just in programs, but in the people designing and delivering them.

What we’ve come to understand is this: Our work is most powerful when schools are ready for it.

Ready to see differently.
Ready to try differently.
Ready to challenge long-held assumptions about what ‘counts’.

That’s where this partnership becomes so important.

By pairing Tomorrow’s Talent’s focus on creating Resume Worthy Experiences at scale with Catapult’s ability to expand educator mindset and build institutional readiness, we can now support schools more comprehensively than ever before.

Not just in implementing new opportunities. But in rethinking the conditions that make those opportunities possible in the first place. Because when mindset shifts, systems follow.

And when systems follow, students gain access to experiences that don’t just prepare them for the future; they help them prove they’re ready for it.