Develop a Plan of Action

Step 1: Clarify Your Vision 

The first step in developing your data improvement strategy is to define your destination. What is your vision for career readiness in your state? How can data be used to achieve that vision? This step is a good opportunity to reach consensus with inter-agency partners and consider aspirations across education levels.

Step 2: Identify and Prioritize Challenges

Go through the needs assessment in Section 2 and review the scores you selected for each core element and sub-element. Use the Assessment Summary to list the scores, illustrating the strengths and areas for improvement across your state’s data ecosystem. This step can help you identify and prioritize focus areas for your action plan.

Do you notice any patterns? Are the higher or lower scores clustered in the same core elements, or are they distributed across all six? Could success in one category have a downstream impact on others? Perhaps the biggest data quality challenges for your state system could be resolved through a single, focused policy action such as clarifying governance and responsibility for data collection, analysis and reporting at the state level. In other cases, your state may need a more comprehensive strategy to improve data quality and use. 

Looking across all of your needs assessment scores, and considering the full career readiness data ecosystem in your state, what do you see as your state’s biggest strengths and challenges? List them in the table below. Keep in mind that some challenges may be cross-cutting and influence multiple core elements. 

Step 3: Set Your Goals

Your action plan should be focused on addressing these barriers and shifting policy and practice in your state toward a 4 on the assessment rubric to achieve the vision you described. In the table below, identify specific goals for achieving your career readiness data vision. Consider the SMART framework for goal setting. Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Bound.

• Specific: In as much detail as possible, describe the challenge and what you hope to accomplish. Identify those responsible and accountable for meeting the goal. 
• Measurable: Identify measures of success and how you plan to track progress. 
• Attainable: Make sure the goal is realistic. Do you have the skill, will and resources to achieve this goal? If not, what is a more realistic goal? A good SMART goal is both ambitious and attainable. 
• Relevant: Make sure the goal is related to your career readiness vision. How will it help you actualize this vision? 
• Time Bound: Set a specific date when the goal will be achieved.

Step 4: Identify Resources

What resources are available to help you achieve these goals? What public, private or in-kind support is available? Do
you already have the staffing capacity and technology needed?

Step 5: Map the Work 

Now that you have established SMART goals and identified the resources available to help achieve them, you are ready to map out your full action plan and identify the specific steps you will take to realize your vision for career readiness data quality. In the table below, list the specific activities needed to achieve each of your SMART goals. For each activity, identify a primary owner, a completion date and a measure of success. Refer back to Section 3 to identify the state levers for achieving this goal. Do you plan to enact new policy, invest in technology, leverage people or establish new processes?