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When you search for a college, it can help to look at current students and alumni to gauge how you might also approach opportunities while attending classes and after graduation.

UOPX Director of Career Services Jessica Roper has seen a variety of student and alumni experiences during her two decades with the University. As she explains, earning a degree can prepare students for careers, but completing a degree is only one part of the puzzle — and that’s where a UOPX-style education can help.

“Now, we’re more commonly seeing ‘skills-based hiring,’ in which employers are looking for a combination of academic credentials and practical skills,” Roper says. “At UOPX, we have a wide range of programs that align with specific skills-relevance and reflect current job market demands.”

UOPX focuses on offering skills-aligned programs in which coursework, assessments, and workplace insights from practitioner faculty prepare students for today’s workforce. The University also offers students visibility to which skills they’ve mastered and can take to the workplace. In this way, students not only learn career-relevant skills; they also know when and how they’ve learned them so that they can practically apply them at work.

Booker can attest to the value of a skills-based education, but it’s the human connection that resonates most with him.

“In my 24 years, I have been at two commencement ceremonies where I’ve had the opportunity to take a photo onstage with a mother and her daughter getting their degrees on the same day at the same time,” he says. “That is powerful stuff.”

For prospective students beginning their college search with ��������ʿ�����¼, one of the best places to begin is with the wide range of programs and certificates available. From associate degrees to doctoral degrees, UOPX is appropriately described by Booker as a “full-cycle institution” where students can pursue degrees at multiple levels with career-relevant specializations.

Four prominent areas of interest for UOPX students are:

●      Business (such as accounting, business administration, marketing and project management)

●      Information technology (including cybersecurity, computer science and data science)

●      Healthcare (such as health administration, informatics and healthcare compliance)

●      Education (including education leadership and educational technology)

Many programs are led by University faculty who are practitioners within their fields, teaching students how to apply textbook learning as applied skills in real-world situations.

“Largely, our goal is to help students who want to enhance their careers, or who are working adults who may have taken a break from their education and need help to get over the finish line,” Booker says.

In addition to networking with other students in their classes, students have access to a suite of career development tools. The University’s Career Navigator™ tool is available on the first day of classes and lets students explore potential careers as well as how the skills they are learning at school can potentially help align them with career opportunities.

UOPX also offers a Career Services for Life^® commitment, which features career advisement from the day they start class and through the entirety of a graduate’s career.

While Booker notes that 70% of enrolled students are already working, those who are seeking new career paths or upward mobility in their fields can find significant opportunities from their learning experience at UOPX.

“Our goal is to try to help our students build a narrative that makes them stand out from other applicants in real time,” Booker says. “Our students are not just showing their progress toward a degree in course completion, but moreover the skills and learning they are gaining that is embedded into that degree program, which is unique to their personal academic journey before they graduate.” 

When a prospective student starts to compare schools, a large portion of their decision may rest on financial aid, scholarship options and tuition. For individuals who have UOPX on their college list, the University’s Tuition Guarantee basically means the tuition rate that’s in effect when a student enrolls will be the tuition rate that student keeps until they graduate from the program they started.

When it comes to affording tuition, students have options. Federal financial aid is available for UOPX  degree programs. Scholarships are also available to students based on a variety of factors, including merit, academic experience, and interests.

Additionally, all prospective students should research and evaluate the options for scholarships at their chosen institution. UOPX offers a number of scholarship options for bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs.