Career Readiness & Work-Based Learning Infrastructure

MESH is an Indiana-built career readiness and work-based learning platform designed to help students, schools, employers, and regional partners connect more effectively around real career pathways. Built with the Indiana Uplands in mind, MESH helps students turn their interests, skills, experiences, and personal stories into internships, micro-internships, job shadows, mentorships, projects, and employer-connected learning opportunities. The long-term vision is bigger than a student platform. MESH is being designed as regional education and workforce infrastructure that can help schools, employers, civic leaders, and economic development partners better understand the future talent pipeline.

The Challenge

Schools are being asked to expand career readiness and work-based learning, but the process is often fragmented. Students need more than a static career quiz. Counselors and coordinators need better visibility into student interests and readiness. Employers need an easier way to create meaningful, student-friendly opportunities. Communities need better insight into the future workforce they are trying to build. MESH brings these pieces into one shared platform.

What MESH Does

For students, MESH supports profile building, career exploration, opportunity discovery, applications, resumes, messaging, and guided preparation. For schools, MESH provides better visibility into student interests, participation, approval workflows, opportunity engagement, and work-based learning activity. For employers, MESH offers a structured way to create internships, micro-internships, projects, mentorships, job shadows, and early talent pipelines. For communities and regional partners, MESH has the potential to provide aggregated, privacy-protected insights that can help inform workforce development, economic development, school programming, curriculum planning, business development, city planning, regional strategy, and state-level talent pipeline conversations.

Student Stories to Real-World Pathways

What makes MESH different is its focus on student narrative. Instead of treating students as quiz results, MESH helps students build a living profile of their interests, skills, experiences, goals, and accomplishments. That profile can begin in high school and grow over time, helping students connect who they are with where they may be headed. The platform already includes AI-supported story and profile tools, with a longer-term vision for deeper AI career coaching, resume support, interview preparation, reflection, and credentialing.

Built for the Indiana Uplands. Designed to Scale.

MESH is being built with the Indiana Uplands in mind, but the model is designed to scale statewide. The opportunity is to help local communities better connect students to employers, support school-based career readiness efforts, and create stronger visibility into regional talent, skill gaps, employer demand, and work-based learning participation. Over time, this kind of data could help communities make better decisions about education programming, workforce investment, business attraction, talent retention, and economic development. MESH is not designed to sell student data or create a surveillance tool. The goal is to help students make better decisions, help schools support them more effectively, and help communities better understand and build their future workforce.

Current Status

MESH is currently in beta development and moving toward a production-ready platform. The next phase is focused on school pilots, employer partnerships, regional awareness, and a sustainable access model that can reduce or remove cost barriers for schools. MESH is seeking conversations with school, employer, workforce, civic, nonprofit, and philanthropic partners interested in building a more student-centered and community-connected approach to career readiness and work-based learning.