NSHSS: Empowering Students With the Skills They Need to Succeed at Work

Margot Miller is a program manager for the National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS), an academic honors society that recognizes and supports high-achieving student scholars. She talks about her experience working with D2L to develop the Intern Readiness Certificate Program, which helps equip students with the skills they need to enter the workforce.

About the Intern Readiness Certificate Program

The Intern Readiness Certificate Program (IRCP) is a 10-week online course for high school and college students that’s primarily focused on getting them ready to enter the workplace.

The IRCP has filled a need in the market for upskilling and teaching soft skills. We heard from partners, specifically in corporate industries, that the younger generation lacked the skills needed to come into an internship ready to go. Instead, companies were spending half or more of their time teaching students how to be professional.

Our program has 10 modules: communication, core values, ownership conviction, critical thinking, managing priorities, presence, leadership, relationships, inclusiveness and managing difficulties. There are videos and interactive quizzes and discussion boards for students to put their skills into practice. We’re also able to do live sessions with a Zoom integration to get students working on those skills in real life.

Meeting the Market Need for Soft Skill Training

We began developing the IRCP in 2020 with a different online learning platform, but ran into a lot of issues. The vendor’s customer service wasn’t great. The product worked okay, but we had a hard time onboarding people within our organization because they weren’t very friendly. They didn’t partner with us, and they didn’t really want to help.

Because we wanted to scale the IRCP, we needed a team that would work with us to make the program bigger and more marketable. In our research and efforts, we found D2L Brightspace. I met the team and got a good feel for the people, which was our main priority. We knew that there were a lot of platforms out there that could technically do the work we needed to be done, but being able to have resources in a lot of different areas—particularly around business development, scalability and customer service—was really important to us. Brightspace had all of that.

Developing Courses for New Generations of Learners

Because we’re a high school and college-level organization, we sort of fit between the K-12, higher education and corporate spaces. Having experts in all those areas was a big positive for D2L.

We also use Course Merchant to enable for the sale of programs. It was a fairly new acquisition for D2L when we started our implementation, and the teams worked hard to get our course up and running.

Seeing the IRCP’s Impacts on Students

Tons of students and parents have told us how the course has helped them develop as people and what that means for how they’ll grow in their careers. The course is very self-reflective. It allows students to dive deep into who they are and what impact they can have at work, and it prompts them to really think about what it would mean to become change-makers in industry.

We have one mom who’s written to us about how her child who completed the course has become so much more confident and outgoing because of it. She was having a hard time at her part-time job at a car wash with all of the interaction it required. Since taking the program, she’s started an internship with a CFO who manages four companies and has just been growing as a person.

Written by: