Capella Learning and Career Outcomes

Our Approach - Turning sought-after professional skills and experience into learning outcomes

For working adults, choosing a higher education institution is about more than school reputation. It’s one of the biggest investments of your life. You need to know that the time, money, and effort you invest will have a direct impact on your career.

Until now, the professional impact of higher education has been hard to show.

At Capella, we’re taking a new approach. As a founding member of the multi-institution Transparency by Design consortium, we’ve been developing and refining an academic accountability strategy since 2002. The result: Capella Learning & Career Outcomes.

How we define learning outcomes

Outcomes-based learning is all about clearly defining what success looks like in a particular field…and then working backward to develop the most direct educational path to that success. In the world of higher education, it’s a revolutionary approach. But to us, it’s the only one that makes sense.

How do we do it? First, we partner with faculty members who are experts in their professional fields. We also spend time learning what employers expect from their best employees. We ask employers and faculty to identify:

• The knowledge, skills, and experience needed to excel in their field
• How they define success in their profession

We use those insights to focus our academic programs on specific, measurable expectations called learning outcomes. Then, we make it easy for you to see how those clearly defined outcomes apply to your learning experience and your career.

Find out about the learning outcomes for the programs you're interested in. Ask an enrollment counselor for more information.

How you benefit from learning outcomes

Our Learning & Career Outcomes approach helps you before, during, and after your program.

• Before enrollment: Clearly defined outcomes help you make well-informed decisions to enroll in one of our programs.
• During your education: Get a clear understanding of why you’re taking each course, what you can expect to learn, and how it applies to your degree-and your career.
• After graduation: Confidently move forward in your career with advanced skills and abilities.

How we improve learning outcomes

We use your learning outcomes reports and post-graduation feedback to continuously improve our programs. In fact, that ongoing cycle of program development, measurement, and improvement is central to our Learning & Career Outcomes approach.

More information

• Learning Outcomes - View the proficiency levels of recent graduates in specific programs.