Industry Partnerships that Last: A Playbook for Higher Education
Business and higher education leaders agree: partnership is a priority. Yet fewer than one in five higher education leaders report fully executing on a partnership strategy. The historic, siloed model, where institutions prepare learners at the start of their careers and employers provide jobs, no longer meets the demands of today’s dynamic workforce. The opportunity is clear but so is the complexity. Building meaningful partnerships requires navigating capacity, structure, competing priorities, and rethinking how both sides work together.
Industry Partnerships that Last: A Playbook for Higher Education is a guide for higher education to build, structure, and sustain effective partnerships with business that drive talent solutions for learners, employers, and regional economies. Whether you're an institutional leader setting strategy, a VP coordinating alignment across departments, or a faculty member looking to embed work-integrated learning into programming, this resource meets you where you are.
This resource contains strategies to build and sustain high-impact business partnerships, case studies on best practices from institutions across the country, and user-friendly tools, templates, and resources for partnership engagement. While the resource was designed for and with community college leaders, the lessons and tools are broadly relevant for higher education.
This toolkit was developed by the Business-Higher Education Forum and the Texas Business Leadership Council through the Workforce Partnership Initiative Texas (WPI Texas), bringing together cross-sector expertise to help institutions and employers build the partnerships that regional economies need most.
