Millstream Career Center Increases Student WBL Hours by 63% with Vector Pathways

The Customer

Millstream Career Center in Findlay, Ohio partners with 14 area high schools and offers 15 work-based learning constructed programs to help students gain real-world, hands-on experiences. In the 2024-2025 school year, over 700 students leveraged the Vector Pathways platform to track their work-based learning (WBL) program hours, and 200 local businesses collaborate through the platform.

The Challenge

• Streamlining and digitizing WBL paperwork to improve student experiences. Millstream Career Center was using paper and pencil to track WBL experiences along with forms that were all printed, delivered, collected, and filed manually. This led to students frequently losing learning agreements; made it very difficult to find important documents; and creating each learning agreement took a long time. Often, documents would never be delivered to interested employers, and evaluations would never be completed and returned, preventing students from crucial WBL opportunities.
• Managing and expanding business partnerships. Millstream Career Center partners with 200 local businesses. With a goal of increasing meaningful student experiences by growing business partners and expanding existing ones, it was important for Millstream to invest in a platform to help them manage all aspects of their partnerships digitally.
• Implementing a flexible platform to meet their specific needs. Millstream Career Center is a compact career tech facility that serves 14 area high schools. It was critical they had a customizable platform to meet their unique needs for digital forms and workflows to streamline processes.

The Choice

Kyle Watts, Work-Based Learning Liaison, wanted to spend more time exploring new opportunities, connecting with business partners, and helping students in a one-on-one capacity instead of spending time on burdensome administrative work.

Millstream Career Center chose the Vector Pathways Platform to help them:

• Streamline WBL processes and digitize documentation by implementing digital forms and workflows, a digital platform to manage their WBL processes from start to finish, which includes digital signatures, WBL tracking, evaluation processing, and connecting students and instructors to business partners.
• Increase student engagement and remove common obstacles preventing them from engaging with business partners. Whether it’s a learning agreement or an evaluation, Vector Pathways engages students every step of the way throughout their WBL experience; ensures critical documents are digitally signed; and tracks their progress.
• Enhance business partnerships and remove hurdles that may have prevented student experiences due to missing paperwork, lengthy evaluation forms, and ineffective communication between instructors and business partners. Vector Pathways has helped Millstream implement streamlined methods of sharing learning agreements, collecting signatures, and creating/distributing student evaluations.

The Change

As a leading career tech facility, Millstream Career Center has a work-based learning platform that meets the needs of all students, parents/families, instructors, and administrators by:

• Reducing Administrative Work & Increasing One-on-One Time with Students – Millstream Career Center trusts Vector Pathways to manage its WBL logistics, tracking, and paperwork while its expert team can help its student’s one-on-one to provide the best quality experiences for students that fit their interest, skills and availability.
• Increasing Student WBL Hours by 63% – In 2022, students logged around 37,000 WBL hours and last year it improved to 58,000 WBL hours. The platform makes it easy for Millstream to create and manage new opportunities for students and as the students interact more with the platform, the easier the entire process becomes.
• Building a Centralized Database for Instructors –Millstream Career Center leverages Vector Pathways to provide instructors with a centralized, online repository for them to easily identify a business partner’s contact information, a learning agreement, evaluation results, WBL hours, and more! With over 200 business partners on the platform, this is a critical element to keeping instructors organized and effective.
• Expanding Business Partners – With a goal to continue providing as much investigative experiences and preparation for students’ future careers. Millstream Career Center now has more time for exploring new opportunities and connecting with business partners, more than ever before.

Vector Solutions is proud to partner with Millstream Career Center to help continue to prioritize their student experiences in work-based learning along with growing their active network of business partners in their WBL programs.

About Vector Solutions

Vector Solutions’ Work-Based Learning Platform, Vector Pathways, enables schools, districts, and CTE centers to create more work-based learning experiences for students through streamlined workflows, business partner engagement, and experience tracking.

Our Vector Pathways platform leverages powerful tools to increase the effectiveness of your WBL program by:

• Enhancing & Streamlining Business Partnerships
• Tracking WBL Program Metrics & Data to Drive Decisions
• Simplifying & Digitizing WBL Programs
• Increasing Student Engagement & Demonstrating Career Readiness