Clare Bertrand: Shaping College Board's Role in Career-Connected Learning

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...