For the team at the University of Lethbridge's Career Bridge Centre, the experiential transcript is not a nice-to-have, it's the connective tissue holding together an entire institutional strategy.
Stacey Gaudette-Sharp, Assistant Dean of the Career Bridge Centre, and Susan Roulston, MyExperience Transcript Advisor, have been working with Symplicity Outcome since the platform's earliest days at Lethbridge. What started as a single co-op module in 2017 has grown into a fully integrated system supporting co-op, career services, co-curricular programming, and experiential learning across the university.
"Our MyExperience platform and transcript has really become a central component of our department," says Stacey. "We have positioned Career Bridge as the front door to the institution for all of our community and industry partners."
Before adopting Outcome, the team was managing data through a combination of FileMaker and spreadsheets. The Faculty of Arts and Science Co-op program was an early adopter of the Orbis platform in 2017, first using it to support co-op placements. By fall 2019, the institution had expanded to include co-curricular reporting and the adoption of the experiential transcript.
The real turning point came in July 2020, when the university centralized its career-related programs into a single department right at the start of the pandemic. Career Bridge suddenly found itself integrating three separate departments, all while working remotely and keeping academic programs running.
"It was wild times," Stacey recalls. "It was nice to be able to rely on the Orbis and MyExperience team to support that work."
Susan credits the implementation process itself for setting the team up well. "We had weekly meetings with the Symplicity team, and they were very helpful. They talked us through a lot and showed us how other institutions were running things so it could help us with decisions."
Today, Susan continues to meet monthly with her product success coach, Linda, and is quick to give credit where it's due. "She is absolutely amazing. I have to give her all the shout outs in the world."
Career Bridge now sits at the center of the university's experiential learning and career education strategy, an institutional plan that is fully supported by the Outcome platform. The team manages co-op, career services, co-curricular reporting, two CIRP (Community and Industry Research Projects) courses all within the system. And are working towards practicums, athletics, and scholarships & awards.
Susan and her colleague Roberto spend much of their time connecting with staff and faculty across campus to bring more programs and data into the platform. One active project involves working with the student union to require semester-by-semester reporting in the system, with a goal of embedding that requirement into the union's constitution.
"We're really working on building out the experiential learning module," Susan says. "We want to slowly start working with more faculty to get their courses in the system."
Getting students to buy into a new platform was not without its challenges, especially when the pandemic pushed classes fully online for almost two years. But the numbers tell the story of what consistent investment in student engagement looks like over time.
Since making a concerted push to drive meaningful use of the platform, the Career Bridge team has seen published student transcripts increase by 431%.
"We've really been working hard to get students to use the platform the way it is meant to be used," Susan says. "We're doing a lot of marketing, building help documents and videos, and just making sure the system is easy to use for everyone."
Perhaps the most important shift in how the Career Bridge team thinks about the experiential transcript is this: its greatest value is not in what employers see. It is in what students learn about themselves.
"When students are doing the curation and connecting their skills and competencies to an experience on that transcript, what they're actually doing is building a vocabulary for themselves," Stacey explains. "They are learning how to articulate the theory to practice and the competencies they're developing, whether it's curricular or co-curricular, so that they can promote themselves in conversations with employers."
This reframe from portfolio tool to learning tool is now central to how Career Bridge talks about the transcript with students, faculty, staff, and industry partners alike. It is less about the artifact and more about the process of reflection that creates it.
One of the team's proudest achievements is a first-of-its-kind API integration between Outcome and MyCreds, Canada's national platform for digital credentials.
Initiated by Vice Provost (Students), Kathleen Massey, and built through Susan's direct collaboration with both Symplicity and the MyCreds team, the integration means that when students graduate, their experiential transcript is automatically transferred to their MyCreds account, ready to be shared with employers.
"I think that really led to the increase in usage," Susan says. "Now anyone who has an experiential record will have it automatically put into MyCreds."
For Susan, the integration is a meaningful step, but the goal is bigger. "My ultimate goal is to make sure that every single student on campus has an experiential transcript and they are using it to their full potential."
The University of Lethbridge's Career Bridge Centre uses Symplicity Outcome to manage co-op, career services, co-curricular programming, and experiential learning at scale. To learn more about how Outcome supports institutions in building student-ready experiential records, talk to us!