Make Every Experience Count
Learn how to deliver experiential learning that prepares students for life after graduation.
Experiential Learning Campuswide
Scaling Experiential Learning Across Campus with Experience Hub
March 23, 2026
Across higher education, a clear shift is underway in how students and their families think about value.
Students today are asking a simple question: How will this help me succeed after graduation?
Career outcomes have become a top priority for students and families, and employers increasingly favor graduates who can demonstrate real skills and applied experience. Research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) shows that students who participate in experiential learning often see stronger early career outcomes — including faster career progression, stronger professional networks, and higher starting salaries1.
Experiential learning is no longer a nice-to-have. It's central to how institutions prepare students for the workforce. That shift set the stage for our recent product spotlight webinar, where I was joined by Paurav Surendra, Director of Product Management at PeopleGrove, to explore how institutions can better organize and scale experiential learning opportunities across campus.
The Challenge: Opportunity Exists, but Access Is Fragmented
Most campuses already offer a wide range of experiential opportunities.
Internships coordinated through career centers.
Research opportunities in academic departments.
Service-learning programs.
Leadership initiatives.
Mentorship programs and other co-curricular experiences.
Each of these programs creates meaningful learning opportunities for students. But from the student perspective, they often feel disconnected.
Students often don't know what opportunities exist or where to start looking. Meanwhile, the teams managing these programs work across different departments, systems, and processes — each operating in its own silo.This fragmentation creates challenges on both sides.
Students struggle to discover opportunities, while institutions struggle to coordinate programs, track participation, and demonstrate the overall impact of experiential learning initiatives.
There's also a subtle but important gap between how institutions define value and how students experience it. Institutions tend to emphasize academic rigor, curriculum design, and faculty expertise. Students measure value through career readiness, real-world experience, and return on investment. Institutions create value by offering opportunities. Students experience that value when they can find those opportunities, participate in them, and connect them to outcomes.
Closing that gap is exactly what Experience Hub is designed to do.
A Centralized Hub for Experiential Learning
Experience Hub brings experiential learning opportunities together into a single platform for the entire campus.
Instead of navigating multiple websites or departmental systems, students can discover opportunities like:
- Internships
- Undergraduate research
- Mentorship programs
- Leadership initiatives
- Service learning and community engagement
For institutions already using PeopleGrove’s Engagement Hub, Experience Hub can integrate directly into that environment, allowing students to explore opportunities in a space they already know and use.
The goal is simple: make experiential learning easier to find and easier to manage.
Tracking Participation and Verifying Experiences
As experiential learning becomes more closely tied to graduation requirements and career readiness initiatives, documenting participation has become increasingly important.
Experience Hub provides a structured way to capture and verify those experiences.
Students can apply for opportunities directly through the platform or report participation in experiences completed elsewhere. Each experience record captures details such as:
- Organization or supervisor information
- Start and end dates
- Skills gained
- Tasks completed
- Supporting documentation
Those submissions can then be reviewed and approved by administrators.
This creates a consistent way for institutions to validate experiential learning across programs while reducing manual tracking.
Turning Experiences Into Career-Ready Narratives
One of the most valuable elements of the platform is the co-curricular transcript.
As students participate in opportunities across campus, those experiences are captured and organized into a record of learning outside the classroom.
The transcript highlights:
- Skills developed
- Types of experiences completed
- A timeline of participation
Students can also reflect on their experiences, helping them articulate what they've learned in language that translates to résumés, interviews, and professional conversations. In this way, the co-curricular transcript doesn't just document participation — it helps students connect experience to career readiness.
Supporting the Full Experiential Learning Journey
During the webinar, Paurav also demonstrated how Experience Hub supports the full student journey through experiential learning.
Students can explore opportunities through a centralized opportunity board where they can search, filter, save, and apply.
A recommendation engine suggests opportunities based on interests, academic information, and platform activity.
Institutions can also create Pathways, which guide students through structured programs with steps such as submitting reflections, completing surveys, or reporting participation in experiences.
Groups allow students to connect, by shared interests, programs, or communities while discovering relevant opportunities and resources.
Together, these tools support the entire lifecycle of experiential learning:
- Discover opportunities
- Apply for experiences
- Participate and document involvement
- Translate outcomes into skills and career readiness
Bringing Experiential Learning Into One Connected Ecosystem
One theme that came up during the webinar’s Q&A was change management.
Most institutions already have experiential learning happening across campus. The challenge is not creating opportunities, it is making them visible, coordinated, and measurable.
Experience Hub helps institutions:
- Increase participation in experiential learning
- Reduce manual coordination across departments
- Bring fragmented data together for reporting and analysis
The platform is designed to be flexible within a campus technology ecosystem. Opportunities can be added through manual entry, file uploads, or integrations with external systems like career platforms or study abroad management tools.
Most institutions also launch in phases, starting with a few key programs before expanding across campus.
Connecting Opportunity, Participation, and Outcomes
Experiential learning is one of the most powerful ways institutions prepare students for life after graduation. But as those opportunities grow across campus, students need clearer ways to discover them, and institutions need better ways to track their impact.
Experience Hub connects the entire experiential learning lifecycle, helping students find opportunities, participate in meaningful experiences, and translate those experiences into outcomes that matter after graduation.
If you joined us for the webinar, thank you for being part of the conversation!
If you missed the session or would like to see the platform in action, you can watch the full product spotlight recording here.
And if your institution is exploring ways to better organize experiential learning opportunities across campus, we would welcome the opportunity to connect you with a PeopleGrove expert.
Let's Get Started
Manage Clinical & Non-Clinical Experiential Learning
