The evolution of student employment at ASU
The Work+ story
The evolution of Work+
Work+ began with a question: how do students build valuable, professional skills through student employment and learn how to articulate those skills post-graduation? Student employment is more than a job at ASU. We’ve integrated a working and learning experience that contributes directly to student success and aligns with the ASU Charter–making our metric for inclusion paramount.
Work+ was created with the intention to support the following three core outcomes:
Increasing career readiness.
Enriching supervisor and student employee relationships.
Helping students build confidence in articulating their transferable skills and future career goals.
The evolution of Work+ reflects ASU’s ongoing effort to better support both students and supervisors in achieving those outcomes.
Phase 1
Recognizing student employment as a learning experience
From what if to how can we.
From the initial question, Work+ set out with bold intentions: to create a student employment model that became the learning experience. The first iteration, named the Working Learners Program (WLP), sought to make student employment intentional. By embedding professional development into the job itself and creating reflection-based modules grounded in competency standards, we affirmed that student employment could be a learning experience.
As the pilot progressed, however, we discovered an important insight: the day-to-day student experience was heavily shaped by supervisors. While student-facing content was valuable, supervisors needed to be active partners in student reflection.
Phase 2
Investing in supervisors as learning partners
Based on feedback from students and supervisors, the Working Learners Program evolved into Work+.
Based on feedback from students and supervisors, the Working Learners Program evolved into Work+. This next phase represented a major shift in philosophy. Rather than focusing primarily on student completion of modules, Work+ began emphasizing the role supervisors play in creating developmental employment experiences.
This was a fundamental shift in philosophy. Work+ began to center supervisor relationships as the driver of learning. The framework also expanded to include structured opportunities for students to build career readiness, reflect on their experiences, develop professional storytelling, and connect on-campus work to future careers.
As adoption expanded across ASU, a key lesson emerged. Calling Work+ a “program” created barriers. Departments viewed it as an additional requirement rather than a framework designed to enhance the work they were already doing. Reframing Work+ from a program to a framework was essential to institutional adoption.
Phase 3
Work+ as a framework for the student employee experience
From supporting individual supervisors to building the institutional model
The third evolution of Work+ reflects the most significant evolution yet: building for scale. Today, Work+ is no longer a standalone initiative. It is now foundational to how ASU approaches student employment.
This framework supports the entire student employee experience at ASU. Centered as a guide rather than a program to implement, Work+ adoption becomes sustainable. Version three shifts the perception that student employment is a transactional experience to being an intentional work-and-learning experience.
Recognizing that supervisors are partners in learning, we provide shared language, tools, and resources that supervisors can adapt to their own teams and contexts, rather than telling them how to lead. Many supervisors are already creating developmental working environments. Work+ simply made those practices intentional, visible, and connected to student career growth.
Additionally, this version recognized the need to centralize resources across the entire employment lifecycle while also creating separate hubs for supervisors and students. For students, it provides access to content based on their individual needs. Supervisors are able to find tools to integrate into their workflows. Flexibility and access were built in for both populations in recognition of our charter and with the understanding that each student and supervisor approaches student employment from a different set of experiences and background.
The latest iteration of Work+ empowers students, strengthens student development, help students better understand and articulate the value of their student employment experience long after graduation.