Implementing the Elevate Program: A CHAT Perspective

Career readiness programs in higher education often struggle with a fundamental challenge: how do you build something that genuinely prepares students for professional life while operating within the constraints of an academic institution? The Elevate Program at the Illinois Institute of Technology offers one answer, and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory provides a useful lens for understanding why it works.

CHAT, originally developed by Vygotsky and expanded by Engestrom, examines human activity as a system of interconnected elements — subjects, tools, rules, community, division of labor, and objects. When applied to career readiness programming, this framework reveals tensions and opportunities that more conventional program design approaches tend to miss.

The Activity System in Practice

Elevate serves over 400 students annually with a structured approach to career development that includes digital badges, success coaching, employer partnerships, and employment guarantees for qualifying participants. What makes it distinctive is not any single component but the way these elements interact as a coherent system.

In CHAT terms, the students are the subjects, and their professional readiness is the object. The tools include digital badge platforms, coaching sessions, resume workshops, and employer networking events. The community encompasses faculty, career advisors, employers, and peer mentors. Rules are set by accreditation standards, institutional policies, and employer expectations. And the division of labor distributes responsibilities across career services staff, academic departments, and the students themselves.

"The most effective career programs are not collections of services. They are integrated activity systems where every component reinforces the others."

Identifying and Resolving Contradictions

One of CHAT's most powerful concepts is the idea of contradictions — systemic tensions that can either inhibit development or drive innovation. In Elevate's implementation, several contradictions emerged early.

The first was between academic culture and employer expectations. Faculty valued deep theoretical knowledge; employers wanted demonstrable skills. Rather than choosing one over the other, the program created digital badge pathways that mapped academic competencies to industry-recognized skills frameworks, satisfying both stakeholders.

The second contradiction appeared between individual coaching (resource-intensive, high-impact) and scale (serving hundreds of students with limited staff). The resolution came through a tiered model: self-directed digital resources for all students, group workshops for active participants, and one-on-one coaching reserved for students at critical transition points.

Digital Badges as Mediating Artifacts

In CHAT, tools mediate the relationship between subjects and their objects. Digital badges serve this function exceptionally well in career readiness contexts. They translate learning activities into portable credentials that employers recognize, giving students a tangible artifact that bridges the gap between academic achievement and professional qualification.

The badge system in Elevate is not merely a gamification layer. Each badge maps to specific competencies validated by both academic assessment and employer advisory boards. Students earn badges through demonstrated performance — presenting at a professional event, completing a client project, passing a technical certification — rather than simple attendance.

• Professional Communication badges require a portfolio of written and presented work reviewed by industry professionals
• Technical Proficiency badges align with AWS, CompTIA, or equivalent certification standards
• Leadership badges require documented experience organizing teams or managing projects
• Career Management badges cover resume development, interview skills, and salary negotiation

Expansive Learning and Program Evolution

Engestrom's concept of expansive learning — where an activity system collectively reconceptualizes its object — describes how Elevate has evolved. The program's initial design focused narrowly on job placement rates. Over time, through feedback loops involving students, employers, and academic departments, the object expanded to encompass professional identity formation, lifelong career management, and workplace adaptability.

This expansion was not planned from the beginning. It emerged through systematic attention to participant outcomes and willingness to revise assumptions. Students who went through the program reported that the most valuable aspects were not the discrete skills they learned but the confidence and professional identity they developed — outcomes that the original metrics did not capture.

Practical Recommendations

For institutions considering similar programs, CHAT offers several practical design principles:

• Map the full activity system before designing interventions. Understand who the subjects are, what tools they need, what rules constrain them, and how labor is divided.
• Look for contradictions rather than trying to eliminate them. Tensions between stakeholder groups often point to the most productive areas for innovation.
• Design mediating artifacts (badges, portfolios, certifications) that bridge multiple contexts — academic, professional, and personal.
• Build feedback mechanisms that capture expansive learning, not just predetermined outcomes.
• Distribute ownership across the activity system. Programs that depend entirely on a single office or individual are fragile; programs embedded in multiple institutional structures are resilient.

The Elevate Program demonstrates that career readiness is not a simple service to be delivered but a complex activity system to be cultivated. CHAT provides the analytical tools to understand that complexity and design programs that work with it rather than against it.