The feedback Humber Polytechnic hears from students about work integrated learning now tends to land on the same point: it finally lives in one place. Find the opportunity, complete the field experience, submit the experience, finish the evaluation, all in the same system. For a polytechnic that runs experiential learning across more than 150 programs, that centralization is new, and it is changing the experience for students, employers, and the career team alike.
The shift came last August, when Humber moved from a multi-school environment to a single instance of Symplicity CSM. The platform, which Humber calls Career Connect, had been in place since 2018, but for years it was known across campus mostly as a job board, even as work integrated learning (WIL) ran through nearly every program on different tracks. Each faculty managed its own WIL setup, and the system's fuller capabilities went largely untapped.
"Symplicity for us has always been a system that has had a lot of capacity, and we haven't had the ability to use it to its full extent until recently," said Dimple Rai, Associate Director for Advising and Career Services. "Moving into the single instance in the past year, we've seen a huge change on our campus and really being able to recenter the CSM, what we call at Humber Career Connect, as an institutional careers platform."
The clearest wins have shown up on the student side. Humber sees a lot of program stacking, where students return to complete a second or third credential. In the past, each return often meant relearning a different work integrated learning process depending on the faculty, printing documents, tracking down employer signatures, and bouncing between email, Blackboard, and Career Connect to keep a field experience moving.
That friction is gone. Students now manage the whole experiential learning journey, from finding a field experience to submitting evaluations, in one platform, and they have noticed.
"We've definitely heard from students that this is a lot more structured, and it allows them to monitor their experience in one place. Previously we were asking them to jump between multiple systems, and now they find their opportunities, submit their experiences, and get their evaluations all in the CSM. Having everything in one single place has been one of the highlights for our students."
- Oscar González, Student and Employer Relations Specialist at Humber Polytechnic
For students balancing coursework with a WIL field experience, that consolidation removes a layer of stress that used to come with the territory.
The same platform has given the career office and faculty across campus something they were always short on: time. With work integrated learning, it is easy to get lost in administration, checking insurance and permits, confirming addresses and phone numbers, and managing field experience documentation by hand. With Symplicity's Experiential Learning module handling automated messaging, built-in reporting, and a single home for every program, that load has dropped sharply.
"Our faculties have opened up time in their schedules to do other tasks that they didn't have time for prior to this," González said. He knows the pull of that paperwork firsthand from his own days as a field experience advisor. "It's very easy in the work integrated learning world to get trapped in paperwork and administrative work. With this system, particularly with the automation of messages, with the reporting feature, allowing to have everything in one single space for all of the programs within the faculty, it opens up opportunities for them to actually connect with the employer and build deeper relationships that they didn't have time for prior to implementation."
Rai put it simply. "It's definitely added a lot of efficiencies to a lot of processes that were very manual before."
Centralization is the thread running through all of it. Bringing work integrated learning onto a single instance let Humber standardize how experiences are submitted, formatted, and approved across faculties that had always operated independently. Rather than impose a process from above, González started by mapping every faculty's WIL touchpoints, then built one shared pathway in the Experiential Learning module and iterated from there.
In less than a year, the team launched roughly 100 programs in the system and recorded close to 3,500 experiential learning experiences across two semesters, a level of institutional WIL data Humber had never been able to pull together before.
Employers feel the difference too. A single partner might host a marketing student from one faculty, an HR student from another, and a systems engineer from a third, each in a different WIL program. That once meant three separate processes. Now all three sit in the same interface, the same form, the same fields.
"We've received some really great feedback from employers around how seamless and streamlined the process is now," Rai said, pointing to a consolidated employer database the institution had long wanted and never had. "Having a shared database across campus, which we haven't really ever had before."
With the experiential learning foundation in place, Humber is looking at what comes next, including the career outcomes module, expanded survey use, and a bigger role for Pathways in both first-year career education and academic advising. Through it all, the team credits the support behind the scenes.
"We've had amazing experience with our client manager, but also the implementation specialist that supported us through that major change," Rai said. "A lot of that wouldn't have been possible without their support."