Beyond College: Designing Spaces for How We Learn Now
Written by Jess Klay
From traditional college campuses to technical schools and research institutes, learning continues to take many forms. In this thought leadership piece, Red Thread’s Jess Klay explores the many ways people learn, from college classrooms to career training and beyond, and how spaces can support them throughout their lives.
In this article, she explores:
- How learning takes shape in classrooms and beyond
- How NETTTS and The Roux Institute represent different educational pathways
- What today’s learners need from the spaces around them
- How learning environments can support people throughout their lives and careers
My youngest daughter, Cece, went back to college this fall.
There is something about this time of year that makes us think about learning in a very specific way. My mind immediately goes to college. New fall outfits. The smell (and colors!) of new notebooks. Those sickly dorm room walls made of overly painted cinder block. Campuses filling back up. First-day photos. The nervous jitters.
The academic calendar has trained us to associate learning with a season and, even more interestingly, with an age. We often picture a familiar path: go to school, graduate, start a career. But learning has a way of continuing alongside everything that comes next. Maybe it always has.
Right now, Cece is balancing school, part-time work, family and friendships. Many of us did that too, but her generation is navigating an extraordinary amount of information, technology and change around them. Some of it good. Some of it not so good.
Watching her has made me think about the very different relationship her generation will have with learning and work. She is part of the workforce we keep talking about as “the future.”
Except that future isn’t coming. It’s happening already.
And I know she’ll keep learning long after graduation, just as I have. I may be more of a student now than I was in school.
I have always been insatiably curious.
But here’s the funny thing: I was a horrible student. Yet somehow, I always did well.
I didn’t want to sit around learning about the work. I wanted to do the work.
So I looked for every opportunity I could find to get out there and learn by doing. I signed up for an internship at a real advertising agency. I was shy and timid, but I asked a million questions anyway. I knew I had an opportunity to learn from people who had mastered their craft, and I pushed myself outside my comfort zone to absorb as much as I could.
That instinct never really went away.
Learning Across a Career
My self-propelled career has taken me through graphic design, branding, creative direction, experience strategy, workplace design, technology and now AI. I was fortunate to be part of the dot-com boom and to work alongside one of the early pioneers of internet recruiting and advertising, Jeff Taylor, as The Monster Board evolved into Monster.com.
And then there are those wonderfully strange full-circle moments.
When I was studying graphic design in college, David Carson’s The End of Print was actually part of my curriculum. His work was provocative, messy, rule-breaking and unlike anything else I was being taught at the time.
Years later, while I was an Art Director at Bose, I got to work with David Carson.
The designer whose work I had studied in college was suddenly right there, someone I could watch, question and learn from in real life.
Talk about a full-circle moment.
What I learned in the classroom gave me a foundation. Since then, I’ve kept building on it by asking questions, learning from people around me, experimenting, researching, getting things wrong, and following ideas somewhere unexpected.AI is changing how we work at an extraordinary pace, and I find myself doing exactly what I’ve always done: learning it by getting my hands on it. I’m constantly exploring new tools and looking for ways to apply them to old problems. Skills that weren’t part of my job a few years ago are becoming part of how I work every day.
The research points to a broader picture of what people bring to a career, and how they keep growing once they’re in one. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect to look at experience and direct evidence of skills when assessing candidates. Work experience remains the most common measure, while nearly half expect to use skills assessments through 2030.
Colleges and universities are part of this picture, too. Coursera’s Micro-Credentials Impact Report 2026, which surveyed more than 3,500 learners, employers and higher education leaders, found growing interest in programs that pair degrees with credit-bearing micro-credentials. Students were about twice as likely to say they would enroll in a program offering them.
A Foundation to Build On
A degree can be a meaningful foundation. What interests me is how many ways there are to build on it, both in higher education and throughout a career.
The Many Ways We Learn
When I think of higher education, I picture a campus: quads, lecture halls, libraries and students finding their footing. Those places matter, and they’re still evolving to serve students in new ways.
I also think about the learning that happens at other stages of life. A 45-year-old learning a trade. A professional developing new skills as her industry changes. A researcher working with entrepreneurs to bring an idea to market. Someone taking a night class or earning a certification while working full time. Some of that learning happens on a college campus; some happens elsewhere.
Each person brings different experiences, schedules and goals. The spaces where they learn should reflect that.
Two Very Different Classrooms
I’ve seen this firsthand through two Red Thread projects that have made this especially clear to me: both support learning, but for people at very different points in their lives:
At New England Tractor Trailer Training School, or NETTTS, students pursue practical skills and new career opportunities through hands-on technical education.
At its Haverhill campus, HVAC classrooms sit beside the lab, allowing students to move easily between instruction and application. Learning doesn’t stay theoretical. Students can hear something, discuss it and then go do it.
But what I find equally interesting is everything happening around those classrooms.
NETTTS is a third-generation family business, and this was one of my first projects when I joined Red Thread. I remember hearing CEO Samantha Greenberg talk about how she wanted to evolve the company and how important this new headquarters was to that evolution.
That made my heart sing.
The team thought carefully about the experience from the moment students and their families arrive. They were working with an experiential design agency, using bold messaging, playful graphics and three-dimensional objects to tell the brand story throughout the environment. Comfortable lounge spaces welcome prospective students and their families. A café creates opportunities to connect or decompress.
The place comes alive.
To me, that’s the total package: education, brand, culture and physical environment working together to tell people, this matters, and what you’re doing here matters.
Then consider The Roux Institute of Northeastern University in Portland, Maine.
Its model looks entirely different. The Roux Institute brings together graduate education, research and entrepreneurship, with a focus on technology, talent development and economic growth. Its environment includes open and enclosed classrooms, study areas, a café, amphitheater, makerspace, research areas, meeting rooms and flexible workspaces designed to encourage interaction among learners, faculty and staff.
One environment is deeply connected to learning a trade.
The other brings together graduate education, research, technology and entrepreneurship.
Very different learners. Very different paths.
Yet I see the same fundamental idea in both: People need places that make them feel capable of becoming something they aren’t yet.
That may be one of the most important things a learning environment can do.
Where Learning Happens
Once you start looking at education through this lens, the boundaries between learning environments and workplaces become much less distinct.
A classroom can be a lab. A lab can be a workplace. A workplace can be a classroom.
A café conversation can teach you something a presentation never could.
And sometimes, one conversation can completely change the way you think about an industry.
At a recent CoreNet event, I spoke with the GM of a global firm about the education projects we’re seeing across New England. We talked about colleges and universities, as well as training programs and other places where people are building skills throughout their careers.
I kept thinking about that conversation afterward. These places serve people with different goals and at different stages of life, but they share something: learning depends on access to the right tools and opportunities to work with other people. That gives us a lot to think about when we design spaces for it.
There is no more “set it and forget it.”
Some of the most valuable learning in my career has happened in conversations with people who see a problem differently than I do. Their questions have helped me reconsider my own approach and see possibilities I might have missed.
Which makes me wonder if our idea of a learning space can stretch a little further.
A classroom where a discussion opens up a new way of thinking. A makerspace where an idea becomes something you can test. A conference room where a team works through a difficult problem. An industry event where one conversation changes how you think.
Maybe we don’t need a new definition of a learning space. Maybe we just need to notice how many of them we move through.
Start with How People Learn
A 19-year-old undergraduate, a 38-year-old parent changing careers and a 55-year-old executive figuring out AI may all be students.
But they don’t arrive with the same expectations, circumstances or ways of learning.
Today’s learning environments need to accommodate different schedules, different bodies, different ways of processing information, different levels of confidence and very different reasons for being there.
That means providing choice.
People need room to work together, focus on their own, try things out and take in new ideas. Technology can support those experiences, while quieter moments give people space to pause and reflect. And as programs and teaching methods evolve, the environment should be able to evolve with them.And, importantly, spaces that communicate:
You belong here.
Someone walking into a technical training program to completely change careers may be taking one of the biggest risks of their life.
Someone entering an advanced research institute may be trying to solve something no one has solved before.
The environment can’t do the learning for them.
But it can give them confidence, connection and a sense of possibility.
Learning Along the Way
Cece will graduate from college before I am ready for it.
There will be photographs. A cap and gown. A diploma. A very clear marker telling us she has completed something.
But I hope she never believes she’s finished learning.
I don’t want that for her generation, and I don’t want it for mine.
My own career has taught me that reinvention doesn’t happen once. We are going to be asked to learn, unlearn and relearn throughout our lives. Sometimes because we want to. Sometimes because technology, our industries or life itself demands it.
These days, one of the things I’m most curious about is the environment around all of this.
How do our spaces actually help us?
I’m fascinated by the beauty and wonder of space, but even more by the whole experience of it. How a space feels. What it communicates. The story it tells. How brand, culture, human behavior, technology and the physical environment come together.
It matters for companies and institutions.
It matters for the brands they are building.
And, most importantly, it matters for the humans inside them.
So perhaps “back to school” isn’t really a season anymore.
Maybe we’re all going back to school, all the time.
Keep Learning
For those of us who design learning environments, that means thinking about the full experience, from classrooms and labs to the places where people study, collaborate and connect. Each can give people room to ask questions, try something new and build confidence.
Learning helps us explore our potential and connect with the world around us. And because we keep learning throughout our lives, the places that support us can take many forms: colleges and research institutes, technical schools, workplaces and career-training environments.
Explore how thoughtfully designed environments can support a lifetime of learning in Red Thread’s Education Learning Spaces Guide.
Many thanks,
Jess
Jessica Klay
Workplace Consultant
Red Thread
774.364.0833
jklay@red-thread.com
With more than 20 years of experience, Jess brings a thoughtful, consultative approach to helping organizations connect people, culture, and space. Having led global brand experiences and workplace transformations for Workhuman, Monster Worldwide, and Bose Corporation, she draws on first-hand client-side experience to understand each organization’s unique challenges and opportunities, partnering closely with clients to develop solutions that are both strategic and human-centered.
Jess joined Red Thread because of a shared belief that the workplace is more than a physical space; it’s a powerful tool for connection, engagement, and growth. She specializes in workplace strategy, employee experience, and innovation at the intersection of real estate and technology.
