Jan Jardine’s Bio
Jan Jardine is a career and technical education (CTE) educator with 25 years of experience helping students connect learning to the real world. She began her career as a Business, Marketing, and Computer teacher before transitioning into Work-Based Learning (WBL), where she discovered the powerful impact of authentic, industry-connected experiences for students. Jan is passionate about building strong partnerships with business and community leaders to create meaningful opportunities that prepare students for both college and careers.
Jan serves as the Vice President of the ACTE Work-Based Learning Division, a role that allows her to collaborate with WBL professionals across the country. Through her work with ACTE and Utah ACTE, she stays deeply engaged in national research, emerging best practices, and policy conversations related to work-based learning. She regularly reviews conference proposals and professional literature to ensure educators have access to high-quality, relevant information and resources.
A consistent message Jan shares with educators is simple but powerful: share your story. She believes educators are doing incredible work every day, and when those stories are shared, they strengthen support from communities, industry partners, and policymakers.
Outside of work, Jan enjoys spending time with her family—including her husband, eight children, two grandchildren (with one more on the way), and a growing extended family. She loves hiking, camping, running, cooking, reading, crocheting, and, most of all, being together with the people she loves.
Jan Jardine explains how work-based learning helps students connect classroom learning with real-world careers through internships, apprenticeships, and CAPS-style industry projects, often revealing both what students love and what is not a good fit before they invest in postsecondary education.
She describes how CAPS programs “bring industry to students” by embedding them in professional environments where they work in teams on authentic client projects, practicing skills like communication, project management, and handling iterative feedback instead of just observing adults at work.
She emphasizes the importance of starting career-connected learning earlier, moving beyond a 9–12 or “just CTE” model by integrating projects and industry connections into middle school courses like College and Career Awareness and even elementary-level career exploration, so students do not “meander” through pathways without direction.
Jan also pushes for breaking down silos between core academics and CTE, sharing examples of engineering students who independently applied calculus to design a moving staircase prototype, illustrating how interdisciplinary, project-based work makes academic content meaningful.
For rural and under-resourced communities, Jan urges educators to treat the school system itself as an industry partner—leveraging child nutrition, IT, transportation, HR, and other internal departments, as well as nearby community colleges, to create rich work-based learning experiences even where external employers are scarce.
She reflects on the 2025 ACTE CareerTech Vision conference (in New Orleans this year), noting growing national momentum: more conference sessions on rural innovation, younger grades, and postsecondary collaboration.
Jan highlights the upcoming National Work-Based Learning Conference in Rhode Island (April 29–May 1), where sessions will range from foundations for new coordinators to advanced topics for experienced leaders looking to “level up” their programs, with special attention to business partner engagement and rural models.
She also shares details about the ACTE-sponsored Leadership Alliance for Work-Based Learning, a new cohort for 10 practitioners that includes in-person learning at the conference, five virtual sessions, and a capstone project to be presented at the 2027 conference, designed to help leaders tackle real challenges in their own contexts.
Her call to action for educators is simple but powerful: share your story—do not assume your work is “no big deal,” because when you consistently tell students’ success stories, communities, industry partners, and policymakers better understand the impact and begin to advocate for and invest in this work.
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