Design a second custom experience to fill one specific skill gap. Finish with something that did not exist before. Requires your first wild card experience.
Elective
Flight Plan: Second Custom Experience
Design your own. Fill the gap you actually have.
What you walk away with
Your Flight Plan, and the Thing It Produces
Two documents and one artifact. The Flight Plan is the proposal you submit before you start; the artifact is what exists afterward that did not exist before. If you cannot name the artifact in the plan, the plan is not finished yet – and that is the single most common reason a custom experience produces nothing you can use.
No cost. We recommend completing your first wild card experience before a Flight Plan, though it is not required – the first one teaches you how much ten hours actually holds, which is what makes the second proposal realistic. Submit the plan before you begin: work done first and described afterward is difficult to approve, and impossible to coach. Talk it through with a coach
1ABOUTWhat This Is▾
Your second wild card. Rather than pick from a catalog, you design the experience yourself around a gap in your own record – and because you chose it, you own the whole thing, which is exactly what makes it worth talking about later.
Work backward. Name the competency you cannot currently tell a story about, then design the smallest piece of real work that would produce that story. Ten hours aimed at one gap beats forty hours of general activity.
Badges Earned
Credentials
Who This Suits
Right For You If
Students who have finished a first wild card and know roughly where they are thin. Anyone whose target roles ask for something their transcript does not show.
College Alignment
Where This Fits
Illinois Tech is organizing its programs into three interdisciplinary colleges. Illinois Tech Futures
2WHERE TO AIM ITQuick Ideas by Skill Gap▾
Pick the competency you cannot currently evidence, then borrow the idea beside it. Each one ends in something a person can look at.
Ship something that runs – an app, a dashboard, an automation – or earn a certification and apply it to a real dataset or workflow.
Fills: Technology
Publish or present: a short podcast series, a talk at a student chapter, an article, or documentation somebody else now uses.
Fills: Communication
Start something and run it with other people. A recurring event, a small team, a peer mentoring group – anything where you set the direction.
Fills: Leadership
Answer one real question for one real client. A campus office, a student organization, or a nonprofit with a decision to make.
Fills: Critical thinking
3SKILLS YOU BUILDWhat the Finished Flight Plan Proves▾
Named in the language employers and career readiness frameworks use, so you can put these words on a resume and defend them.
Transfer to any role, in any country. They do not expire when a tool does.
The concrete methods you will have used, by name.
4YOUR ROUTEHow to Complete▾
Four steps. Step one is the one students skip, and it is the one that decides whether the rest produces anything usable.
5KEEP GOINGResources▾
Everything below is free to Illinois Tech students.
