Building a work-study pathway for RED Academy's first international cohort

A new type of student, a new schedule, and a deadline that couldn't slip

RED Academy ran three distinct programs, Digital Marketing, UX Design, and Web Development, that already had to function as one coordinated system through live client projects. Those were the programs selected for the school's first work-study cohort, which meant the coordination problem got harder before it got easier: a full-time curriculum delivered in the evening, for students new to Vancouver, whose student visas made a work-study placement a legal requirement, not just a career outcome. Nothing about it could be solved program by program. Onboarding, curriculum delivery, career preparation, and the co-op pathway all needed to work as one system across three programs and a new kind of student population.

Mapped the experience, then built the team to run it

As GM, I led the redesign of the student experience for this new population, mapping the operational and service design work end to end, building the workflows, systems, and artifacts the program would run on, and hiring the people needed to run it.

1. 01
   Onboarding for a new program, and a new city

   Working alongside admissions, curriculum, and student services, I mapped the end-to-end journey of a student arriving with no existing ties to Vancouver, surfacing where the current onboarding experience assumed a context these students didn't have.

2. 02
   A full-time outcome, on an evening schedule

   I worked with instructors and program leads to map how a full-time curriculum actually got delivered day to day, then restructured that workflow to fit an evening format without quietly cutting the outcome it was meant to produce.

3. 03
   Service-blueprinted a new co-op placement system

   With no existing process to adapt, I built a service blueprint spanning students, RED, and employer partners, sourcing, vetting, and matching, and used it to align the team around a shared, end-to-end system rather than a patchwork of individual efforts.

4. 04
   Promoted an owner

   Once the program was running we saw that workload was real, I hired a dedicated program lead and handed her a system already mapped and working, not a blank page.

5. 05
   Learned from the first cohort and iterated from there

   I facilitated a retrospective with the team after the first cohort, using what surfaced to redesign the Personal & Professional Development program for the international students who'd follow.

Seeing the full picture, we realized the co-op program needed a leader of its own.

The obvious path would have been to treat this as a translation problem: take the existing program and shift the clock. Instead, we mapped the whole student journey end to end, from recruitment through graduation. That mapping is where the gap showed up. A work-study visa made placement a requirement, and the co-op pathway touched so many moving parts that it couldn't sit on top of someone's existing workload. It needed one person to own the whole program. So I made the case for a new role and hired for it. Looking back, I'd have built that role in from the start, but it took laying out the full system to see it clearly.

The team put in the work to adapt, and it showed

The program launched its first cohort of 25 international students on a work-study pathway, from recruitment through onboarding, curriculum, co-op placement and graduation. All 25 students found a co-op placement, a 100% placement rate. Getting there took a lot of adapting from our team and program leaders, who reworked how they taught, supported and placed students as we went. The first cohort's retrospective reshaped the Personal & Professional Development program for the cohorts that followed, turning a first-run lesson into a lasting improvement rather than a one-off fix. It also uncovered a bigger need: a better LMS for the whole organization.