The portable career agent

Goal

Students should finish the course owning one thing that keeps working: a portable career agent that holds their goals, their plan, and their materials in one place and keeps building on them as their ambitions change. The course is designed so the semester’s separate assignments, goals, a marketing plan, target jobs, a skills-gap analysis, a learning plan, resumes, and interview practice, converge into that single artifact rather than scattering into files a student never opens again.

Audience

Online design students finishing an associate degree, most of them working adults, each headed toward a different goal. Because every student’s target is their own, the course has to work as a personal learning environment rather than a single one-size assignment set.

Learning objectives

By the end of the course, a student can:

• Set career goals and a learning plan tied to their own ambitions.
• Produce the core job-search artifacts: a resume, a self-promotion and marketing plan, and a list of jobs they actually want.
• Run a skills-gap analysis against real job postings and build a plan to close it.
• Rehearse interviewing through repeated, low-stakes practice.
• Use AI as a disclosed thinking partner on each task, and judge what it returns.
• Build a portable career agent that consolidates the semester’s work and can keep extending it toward new goals after the course.

Each objective is written as an observable action and is evidenced by a graded artifact, so every outcome the course claims is tied to something the rubric measures.

Process

The semester runs as a personal learning environment. Rather than a shared set of deliverables, each student works toward their own goals through a sequence of assignments, set your goals, build a marketing plan, find the jobs you want, run a skills-gap analysis, write a learning plan, alongside the resume work and interview practice a real job search needs. Grounded in connectivism, the design treats learning as something a student builds through their own network of goals, tools, and people, not a sealed loop of tasks.

AI was introduced as a thinking partner on those assignments, with disclosure and modeled ethical use, and the work measurably improved. Starting in fall 2026, Render, the career environment built into the course, holds all of it in one place, so a student leaves with a single artifact instead of a dozen files. The capstone is the portable career agent itself: students learn to build the agent that will keep extending this work toward whatever they aim at next, long after the course is over.

Alignment

Every assignment is a graded artifact that evidences a stated outcome, and the assignments accumulate into the capstone rather than standing alone. The final agent is assessed on the work it consolidates and on the student’s spoken defense of their choices, so the evidence is the student’s own process, not a file a model could generate on its own.

Technology behind the course

• Canvas as the LMS, with competency rubrics and analytics driving term-over-term revision.
• Render, the career environment built into the course, holds each student’s goals, plan, and materials in one place, starting fall 2026.
• Instructional video recorded and captioned in Canvas Studio, so every video is accessibility-checked.

Technology students use

• Render, to build and store their personal learning environment and export their career agent.
• Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects) for portfolio and media work.
• Discord for critique and community, Miro for planning.

Outcomes

The signal so far is early and stated honestly: across terms, as AI scaffolding was added to these assignments, the work improved, and the design now consolidates that gain into one durable artifact. The full before-and-after runs with the fall 2026 cohort, the first to build in Render across the whole semester. What the course is built to produce is a student who leaves not with a grade but with a working career agent, and the ability to keep rebuilding it as their goals change.