Clare Bertrand, Executive Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at College Board, discusses how one of education's most recognized organizations is expanding its mission beyond college admissions to embrace career-connected learning as a core priority. Clare shares the story behind AP Career Kickstart, a new suite of courses co-designed with IBM, CompTIA, and Cisco that allows students to earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials before graduation, with the first two courses, AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity, launching nationally in fall 2026. The conversation explores how deep partnerships with chambers of commerce across 41 states have shaped the design of these courses, why employers are hungry for a trusted, nationally recognized signal of durable skills, and how College Board is thinking about scale in a way that honors local labor market context. Clare also reflects on the acquisition of Teamship, the role of intermediaries in connecting employers to schools, and what it will take for educators, employers, and policymakers to become true forces in expanding access to career-connected learning for all students.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry, and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces Podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

As we close out the academic year and take some time to reflect on the past year of our work at Work Forces, we're struck by a theme that keeps showing up across our work: the integration of academic and career preparation across learning experiences, from K-12 through higher education.

Julian Alssid: That's right. Listeners may remember our recent conversation with Dan Gonzalez when his company, District C, was building project-based learning experiences that put students to work on real business problems. Since then, District C became part of College Board, an organization most of us associate with the SAT and Advanced Placement exams. That shift is part of a broader initiative asking what it means to prepare a student for both college and career, not as two separate tracks, but as one continuous throughline.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Which brings us to our guest today. Clare Bertrand, Executive Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem Strategy at College Board, leads the chamber, intermediary, and philanthropic partnerships behind the development of AP Career Kickstart, a new suite of courses co-designed with IBM, CompTIA, and Cisco that lets students earn college credit and industry-recognized credentials before graduation. Before joining College Board, Clare was a senior leader at Jobs for the Future, where she helped build one of the field's first career navigation tech products. She also co-founded a neurodiversity intermediary focused on building more inclusive talent pipelines for higher-performing companies. Clare, welcome to Work Forces. We're so glad to have you with us on the podcast today.

Clare Bertrand: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. And I love starting a conversation that references Dan Gonzalez and Teamship. Dan's one of my favorite people at College Board, and I'm so thrilled for Teamship to be part of our portfolio. So thank you for that. I'm just very excited to get into it.

Julian Alssid: It was great to interview Dan, and the flow is obvious and will become more so as we have this conversation. So to kick us off, tell us in your own words about your background and the path that led you to your current role at College Board.

Clare Bertrand: So as you mentioned, I was a senior leader at JFF before joining College Board. There I directed federal initiatives and innovation partnerships, and I launched a career and technical navigation product that was used by Job Corps and really focused on young people who were overage and undercredited in high school — what they used to call opportunity youth, but really students who are disconnected from education and the workforce. That role gave me a 360-degree view of the systems and actors that inform how students get to and through school and into the workplace as young adults. And as mentioned, I did co-found a talent intermediary focused on helping companies hire and retain neurodiverse individuals, working mainly with the cybersecurity industry. That experience helped me understand the gap between employer and worker expectations, which was very real in that work.

When I came to College Board, I authored our career and partnership strategy to position College Board and its programs within the broader education and workforce ecosystem, to really help expand our reach to more students and ensure that we clear a path for students to thrive in whatever they choose to do after high school. So now I lead partnerships, and that really focuses on the launch of our AP Career Kickstart courses, which you all mentioned and we'll get into a little later. I'm in regular conversation with chambers of commerce, companies, schools, national and local intermediaries, and philanthropic partners. College Board is in new rooms and new conversations, and it's a really exciting time. And finally, I'll mention that my husband has been teaching in the classroom for 25 years, so that keeps me very grounded in the everyday world of teaching and learning.

Kaitlin LeMoine: College Board has long been associated with traditional college prep and AP courses. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the decision to expand into career-connected learning with AP Career Kickstart as a core offering, and what's driving that.

Clare Bertrand: It's very true — college is in our name. We've been working to help students get into college for over a hundred years. And to be clear, college is still the right choice for many students, but it isn't the path for all students. Given that we're a mission-driven nonprofit, we know that we can do better to reach more kids. Our CEO thinks of our mission in three ways: we want to help students feel that their work is relevant, especially the work they're doing in high school; expand our programs to reach more students; and ensure that all students are ready for the future of their choice — whether that's a four-year college, a two-year college, apprenticeship, or going straight to work. We really want them to be prepared for that.

AP Career Kickstart lives at the center of all three. Advanced Placement, which has been around for seventy years, is a college-level course that confers college credit, and we save students about three billion dollars in tuition every year. I love that statistic. Our new AP Career Kickstart courses are built with AP's thoughtful design process — they're built with faculty and industry at the table, which is quite new for us, and are connected to in-demand occupations. Our first two courses launching this fall are AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity. We want students to have more choice, and we want to give employers stronger signals of readiness — the same thing we do for universities and colleges, but now at scale for career. So we're tackling both a skills gap issue and a validation gap. Students who have these skills sometimes can't articulate them, and employers aren't sure what signal to trust outside of degrees and certifications. College Board, we feel, is uniquely positioned to help fix this. We're already thinking of ourselves as a trusted validator of career readiness, and we believe we can provide the same signal for career that we've long provided for college readiness.

Employers and industry are at the table, and the goal here is simple: at the end of the day, we want to end the artificial divide between students who are going to college and students who are going into careers. Students deserve both, and they're ready for both. A lot of our students work while they're in school, and students want to figure out what's right for them rather than be put on a very narrow path.

Julian Alssid: Clare, you've spent a lot of time meeting with chambers of commerce across the country to help design AP Career Kickstart. What have you been hearing from them and their employer members, and how has that shaped what you're building?

Clare Bertrand: You say "chambers of commerce" and you may have seen a big smile come across my face. I never in my career thought I'd love chambers of commerce so much. Even though I've been working in the education-to-workforce ecosystem for over twenty years, I'd actually never worked with chambers before. I've had the pleasure of overseeing an initiative with the US Chamber of Commerce, which has been a great partner for College Board. The US Chamber has actually endorsed both AP Business and AP Cybersecurity. The initiative we launched together is called Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce, and we invited chambers to help us prepare AP courses and be part of the Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce Coalition. Over 70 chambers in 41 states responded to support the courses and help us raise awareness across the country.

Over the last 18 months or so I've been working with these chambers — listening to them, visiting them, presenting for them — and I've been really impressed by how embedded in their communities they are and how well they translate between education and business. They know the superintendents, they know the businesses, they know the state agencies. They're really an anchor, or what we'd call a backbone organization, across states. I've been so pleased to work with all of them and learn from them.

At the dinners with employers that the US Chamber has set up for College Board, and in speaking with state and metro chambers, one thing we've heard over and over again is that employers struggle to identify early talent. There's really no trusted, nationally recognized signal for durable skills. We did a survey with the US Chamber of 500 hiring managers, and 80 to 90% said that high school students aren't ready for the workforce. But then 90% said they'd love for students to have a business course and some signal of the skills they're building. So we're listening to that and working with employers to get them at the table to help us build not just the two courses we have now, but the courses of the future for Advanced Placement.

We have these continual conversations with employers about how they're working with education and higher education now, and how we can help them work better and bring in the early talent they know they need — with the right signals and understanding of what skills and knowledge students are coming through the door with. Through the Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce Coalition, we now have about 400 letters of support from employers, essentially saying these courses give students the right skills and this is a credential they can get behind. We've been really excited about that, and grateful to the US Chamber as well as state and metro chambers who've helped us better understand how to do this work in local contexts while also scaling it nationally.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I'd love to dive into the design of these courses a little bit. As you're saying, Clare, it sounds like they're working at this intersection of employer need and faculty input. What has been the process of building them out? How do they look and feel? How much of the learning happens out in the community versus in the classroom?

Clare Bertrand: These Advanced Placement courses are designed differently than Advanced Placement traditionally — and I say that with heavy air quotes, because we've been thinking differently about AP for a few years now, starting with AP Seminar, which looks very different from a traditional course like AP History. AP History is a great course, very rigorous, and built with faculty, looking first at data across the country: where should these courses be, what is needed in high school, and what do colleges think students need when entering college? We're applying that same design process to our AP career-connected courses.

AP Seminar, for example, includes performance tasks, not just an exam. Students work in teams, doing research on topics they're interested in. That got us thinking about relevance for students. We saw students light up, and we saw students who had never taken an AP course before go into AP Seminar and say: I can do this, I'm an AP student. We wanted to see more of that. So we thought of AP Career Kickstart as a place where more students could enter into AP and get both industry skills and academic skills.

Where we started was really looking at occupational data, which we hadn't done before — what is in demand in the labor market, and where are the gaps in what's happening in schools? For example, only about 2% of high schools have a cybersecurity course. There's plenty of computer science, which is excellent, but very few cybersecurity courses. So we built AP Career Kickstart: Cybersecurity to be responsive to what high schools need and what employers need, knowing that cybersecurity is a national security issue and there's tremendous need for talent. We designed it as a survey course to really invite students to understand cybersecurity and explore careers within it. We actually have two cybersecurity-related courses — Cybersecurity and Networking — and we've thought carefully about how students can explore careers in that space.

One thing we're trying to do is push against the myth of cybersecurity as people in hoodies alone in a dark corner. Cybersecurity professionals work in healthcare, agriculture, on submarines. Whether you want to go directly to college, directly to career, or into the military, you need some cybersecurity knowledge, and it exists in every single industry.

Similarly, with AP Business with Personal Finance, we wanted to integrate financial literacy into business because we want students to think about how they're going to make money and how they're going to manage it. We love that combination because we want students to have financial literacy, but sometimes financial literacy on its own makes a lot of assumptions about a student's situation and their family's situation. What we wanted to do was give students a business framework so they could take financial literacy and think about it in the context of building a business and thinking of themselves as a business person. That course also has case studies — we're using the Harvard Business School case study model — with 22 employer case studies, and we're inviting employers like McDonald's to submit new case studies as well. We also have competitions as part of AP Business. So there are work-based learning components, project-based learning components, and a real effort to connect students taking AP Career Kickstart to opportunities like internships and apprenticeships. We've got partnerships with CareerWise as part of that. We've been piloting a number of these courses the last couple of years, and they're launching nationally this fall in 2026.

Kaitlin LeMoine: That's really exciting, and really interesting to hear how you're thinking about these fields that cut across sectors. Cybersecurity exists everywhere — it gives students a window into many different industries. And the integration of business acumen with personal finance just seems like such a natural combination and one that is incredibly needed. So exciting to hear about the direction you're taking this.

Clare Bertrand: It's been really interesting when we talk to employers. I made the assumption that employers wouldn't care much about the financial literacy component of the course, which is a really integrated part — it's almost half of the course. I thought they'd want the business survey and the business skills. But actually, employers have been almost as enthusiastic, or more enthusiastic, about the financial literacy piece and the way it's woven into the business content. That's been delightful to hear. And if you look at the data, organizations like Starbucks are actually integrating financial literacy training into their learning and development programs because employees are struggling with it — they didn't get it in school. So we're really excited about the opportunity.

Julian Alssid: As you scale this nationally, Clare — and I think you've begun to answer this — how do you maintain depth while also achieving broad reach? I know you've written about this quite thoughtfully, and I imagine meeting with chambers of all different sizes is one way you're navigating it. How are you thinking about that tension?

Clare Bertrand: I think when we consider scale — and I've been doing national work and running initiatives with funders for quite a long time — scale can sometimes be used as a blunt instrument. If we reach a lot of kids, that must mean it's working. But that isn't necessarily true. What scale really needs is insight into local context. And I'm not the only one saying this — there are fantastic funders, initiatives, and a long history of organizations doing scale right. I just think we need to talk about it more explicitly and make sure we're designing for scale while first starting with local context, ensuring we're replicating quality and rigor in a way that can be customized for that local context.

And that's where the chambers have really helped us. Every single labor market is a little different. Waco, Texas may be thinking about aviation. Des Moines has cybersecurity and a concentration of financial services headquarters. Orange County has data centers coming in. These chambers are thinking about all of those local realities. But when we think about AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity, they know that the course frameworks look the same in every single high school, and what the exam and credential signals to employers across the country is consistent. So we're thinking about how to use the way we've already scaled Advanced Placement and do that same thing for employers, for universities, and for both — making sure students have the same choices regardless of where they live.

Because College Board has teams in every single state and digs in with districts to provide services and professional development to counselors — and now we have stakeholders at chambers of commerce, among employers and industry associations — we're really thinking about the whole ecosystem. And that's going to help us with scale, because we can hand something off and trust that partners on the ground are going to deliver the course framework and the assessment in a way that's meaningful for a student in Des Moines, Iowa, Waco, Texas, or Boston, Massachusetts — and that employers can trust it. We're really excited about thinking about scale differently, and testing how we can do this with our employer and industry partners, as well as schools and higher education.

Kaitlin LeMoine: I can imagine this next phase must be very exciting, because you're going to see how this is implemented in practice across different contexts — where schools need additional support because they don't always have connections to community or business, and where employers are more or less naturally inclined to engage. It sounds like you're at a real juncture of tremendous learning.

Clare Bertrand: Totally, yes. And I think there are opportunities to continue that learning and have that conversation. Something I really like to push my colleagues on — both at College Board and across the field — is to move beyond the headlines. There's a lot of "employers aren't getting the skills they need from education." But then you talk to an employer and they have 18 different higher education partners. They are talking to higher ed, they're informing the curriculum, there's all of this work already happening. And I think if we stop at "the system's broken," we miss what's already working — and a lot is working. What College Board is trying to do is add value to that. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're trying to make sure our courses and assessments fit into what's working and really amplify and validate it. We're learning a lot, we're sharing with our partners, and we're really excited about the launch. AP Business with Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity truly meet the needs of students, families, and employers in the communities they're part of. It's been very exciting.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So, Clare, you've mentioned various stakeholder groups you've engaged with throughout the development of AP Career Kickstart. For all of our guests, we love to ask how others can become forces — given that the name of the show is Work Forces. What would it take for educators, employers, or policymakers listening to this conversation to become forces in expanding access to career-connected learning, drawing on your experience building AP Career Kickstart or your many years in the field?

Clare Bertrand: First and foremost, if anyone wants to learn more about AP Career Kickstart, I'd invite them to go to collegeboard.org/AP-career-kickstart. You can share the link with your listeners. But beyond that, I think for employers and chambers — just getting in the room. We know that high school faculty and college faculty are under a lot of pressure, doing a lot of great work every single day. And while they're working hard to build the academic and durable skills that connect to careers, they need employers and chambers of commerce to step in and say, how can we be helpful? And I think that's really part of why College Board has invested in Teamship, because we want to scale the opportunity for employers to work with schools. It's been a challenge — I've talked to employers who want to work with their school district but face different MOUs for every single high school in their region. It's a lot to handle. Teamship helps smooth that connection, and it's low-hanging fruit. It doesn't require many hours of an employer's time, and it just gets them in the door.

It also gets employer staff genuinely excited, because working with teenagers is fantastic. They get to see how sophisticated, smart, sharp, and full of ideas high school students actually are. So we're really excited that we have the AP Career Kickstart model, paired with the opportunity that Teamship provides — and Teamship can actually be used at any school, whether they have AP or not. We hope most schools will have AP, but we're also thinking about how our chamber partners are setting up internships and how AP students will be more aware of those opportunities. There's a real opportunity for awareness, with College Board as a partner to all these stakeholders, helping folks connect the dots. College Board is traditionally a membership organization and a natural convener, and we're just starting to convene new stakeholders.

Generally speaking, check out AP on collegeboard.org and learn more about AP Career Kickstart in your local area or region. Look into your chamber of commerce — they may be involved in our Preparing Tomorrow's Workforce initiative. We can share a link for that as well. There are a lot of different entry points, but I'd start with the collegeboard.org website.

Julian Alssid: Where can people follow you, Clare?

Clare Bertrand: I'm on LinkedIn, and some of my writing is on the All Access blog, but LinkedIn is definitely the place to follow me.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. It's really great to hear about all of this and to learn about AP Career Kickstart, and we definitely look forward to tracking this as it unfolds. I do think you'll learn a lot, and I'll be really interested to see how a large organization like College Board keeps up with what's around the corner.

Clare Bertrand: Absolutely. It's quite dynamic. We're looking at more career-connected courses to launch, and there's a lot of dynamism in the labor market with AI — I didn't mention AI at all during this conversation, which is remarkable. But that's coming, and we want to make sure students are prepared for it. It's something we think about constantly, and this is why the last two years of building new relationships and thinking about what new tables we can set — with as many stakeholders as are invested in early talent and making sure all kids are successful — has been so important. That's really something we're looking forward to convening and nurturing as one of the biggest national players in the United States and globally.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Absolutely. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today, Clare, and look forward to remaining in touch.

Clare Bertrand: Thank you.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support, and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces.info/podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about the Work Forces consulting practice, please visit workforces.info/consulting for more details about our multi-service practice.