Experiential Learning a Win-Win for Students, Employers

When Sarah Miller decided to register for the School District of New Berlin’s Advanced Innovation & Design (iAID) course as a senior, little did she know it would be the conduit that would lead to a paid internship with an award-winning professional services company. Yet, that is exactly what can happen when you bring together high-achieving students with business professionals for an interdisciplinary, project-based experience designed to develop entrepreneurial skills and dispositions for success in the 21st century innovation economy.

The SDNB has partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Lubar Entrepreneurship Center and The Commons in response to post-secondary education and industry representatives calling for more purposeful development of the skills needed in a world where creativity, collaboration, communication and problem-solving skills will be paramount to success. Additionally, upperclassmen need the freedom and flexibility to approach their education in a way that is different from traditional classes and demonstrate their ability to leverage their knowledge to address an open-ended challenge based on real world problems.

The challenges, which encourage innovative thinking in the areas of global business, technology, engineering, and healthcare, were developed by The Commons, a regional collegiate entrepreneurial skills accelerator. The UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center provides a series of “pop-up classes” to enhance the curriculum, and provide participants with exposure to university faculty. Finally, business professionals volunteer their time as team mentors and/or challenge advisors, lending their expertise to the teams as they work through the scope and sequence of the course, which is based on Stanford’s Lean LaunchPad curriculum.

In comparison to traditional courses that teach students how to execute strategies for known business models, the Lean LaunchPad curriculum teaches students how to search for a scalable and repeatable business model designed to solve a problem. This supports the region’s interest in developing more entrepreneurs as well as intrapreneurs (those that infuse innovation into the organizations in which they work).

Concurrency, Inc., a Brookfield-based professional services firm, provided three mentors for the course’s inaugural year, including Tom Driscoll, a business analysis solution lead. When his company was looking to hire an intern, Driscoll naturally tapped the pool of SDNB iAID students.

“Having first-hand knowledge of the project-based, collaborative nature of the class, I was confident that many of the students would emerge from that experience with the skills necessary to successfully transition to an intern position with our company,” Driscoll said. Other aspects of the course factored in as well. “I was able to observe how the students were challenged with a problem that didn’t have a ‘right’ answer. The class was intentionally unstructured in order to require student teams to figure things out on their own. The productive struggle aspect of the course mirrors the nature of work in the real world and builds the students’ tolerance for ambiguity, a critical disposition to have in our line of business.”

Sarah Miller, now a freshman at UWM, learned about the internship through her iAID mentor, Jake Matschull, a senior business analyst with Concurrency, who was impressed with her communication skills and recommended her for the job. She interviewed and was hired in June. Working full-time over the summer, and now scaling back to part-time during the school year, Sarah is responsible for leading her department’s daily project team “standup” meetings, managing product backlog and website testing.

“The team-based structure of the course allowed me to develop collaboration skills that I use on the job every day, and gave me the confidence to take on tasks such as meeting facilitation,” Miller said. “Thanks to that class, I’m better equipped to work together with people to come to agreements so decisions can be made and projects can move forward.”

In addition to the Concurrency internship, Miller is pursuing another advantage the honors course offers – she is in the process of having her iAID portfolio evaluated for post-secondary credit by the UWM School of Business based on a ‘Prior Learning Agreement’ developed between the SDNB and UWM.

Earlier this month, both Miller and Driscoll shared their experience and thoughts about the iAID program with a room full of parents and students gathered to learn more about the school district’s iAID program. They both, of course, recommended students find a way to participate.

“Being able to observe Sarah and her classmates as they progressed through the course made the hiring process a lot easier,” Driscoll added. “In a departure from the past, more and more companies like ours are looking to bring in interns as early as their freshman or sophomore year. Our intention is for Sarah to continue to learn on the job with us as she works toward a degree. This practice benefits our company by providing us ample time to develop interns within our organization so that when they graduate from college we can hire them on as full-fledged employees and they can hit the ground running and be productive from day one.”

Summing up the mutual benefits realized from the new course, Superintendent Joe Garza added, “We will continue to listen to the input from our post-secondary and industry partners to inform our programming in the School District of New Berlin. When we are aligned to regional needs, everyone wins.”

Professionals interested in assisting in a mentorship/advisor role for next semester’s course beginning in January 2018 should contact Laura.Schmidt@nbexcellence.org and are encouraged to visit the district’s iAID web page at www.nbexcellence.org/district/advance-innovation-and-design-iaid-course.cfm.