A Skills And Workforce Readiness Report For Every TENNAIR Institution

For Tennessee's colleges and universities, the question on every board agenda, every campus tour, and every kitchen-table conversation about tuition has narrowed to a single point: does this degree actually lead somewhere?

It's a fair question. And it lands squarely on the desks of the institutional research, effectiveness, and planning professionals who make up TENNAIR. So we're making it easier to answer with evidence.

Through Mapademics' partnership with TENNAIR — and alongside our partner Coursedog — every member institution can now claim a complimentary Skills & Workforce Readiness Report. It maps the skills your programs teach, aligns them to the specific Tennessee careers they feed, surfaces where the gaps are, and layers in real salary and labor-market data. Institution by institution, program by program. No cost, no data-entry project, and it's yours to keep.

Tennessee's economy is strong. Its assumptions keep moving.

Tennessee has spent the last decade turning itself into one of the South's economic engines. No state income tax. A central location that puts most of the country within a day's drive. A manufacturing base deep enough that Ford's $5.6 billion BlueOval City campus in West Tennessee made Ford the state's fourth automotive OEM, alongside Nissan, General Motors, and Volkswagen.

But look closely at that campus and you'll find the real argument for this report.

When BlueOval City was announced in 2021, it was an electric vehicle and battery complex. Every workforce plan built around it assumed EV powertrains, battery chemistry, high-voltage systems. Five years later, the plan looks different. Ford scrapped the electric pickup and will instead build gas-powered trucks at the renamed Tennessee Truck Plant beginning in 2029. The battery plant is now wholly owned by SK On Tennessee and targets 2028. The 5,800-job commitment stands. The skills behind those jobs shifted underneath it.

That is not a story about Ford. It is a story about how fast the ground moves under a curriculum.

The same pattern is playing out statewide. Oracle is building a $4.5 billion Nashville campus it calls its world headquarters, with 8,500 jobs pledged by 2031. xAI's Colossus supercomputer is the largest capital investment by a new-to-market company in Memphis history. Volkswagen runs its North American Engineering and Planning Center out of Chattanooga. Memphis logistics and one of the world's busiest cargo airports keep pulling supply-chain demand into West Tennessee, and Nashville remains a national hub for health-services companies.

Meanwhile the state cleared its landmark Drive to 55 goal — 55% of working-age adults holding a degree or credential — in 2023, and in late 2025 joined a national collaborative to set the next target. Tennessee Promise, Tennessee Reconnect, and the HOPE Scholarship have made the link between credentials and careers a matter of explicit state policy.

So the connection between what a college teaches and where it leads has never carried more weight — for enrollment, for accreditation under SACSCOC, and most of all for the students themselves. And a labor-market picture drawn three years ago may simply no longer be true.

What the report shows

This is not a generic regional jobs overview. The report is built from your academic programs and translated into a common skills language, so the picture is specific to your institution.

The skills your programs teach

Mapademics reads your programs and surfaces the real, market-relevant skills embedded in them. No manual curriculum mapping required.

Alignment to specific careers

Each program is matched to the Tennessee occupations it actually feeds — named roles and pathways, not vague categories.

Skills gaps and opportunities

See where your curriculum runs light against what Tennessee employers are asking for, so you can strengthen, differentiate, or build new credentials with confidence.

Salary and labor-market outlook

Median wages, demand signals, and growth outlook layered onto every connected career — the numbers a family or a board will want to see.

The report is interactive and built to explore in minutes. Choose any program at your institution, see the careers it connects to and how strongly its skills line up with current demand, then open any role to reveal median wage, salary ranges, and outlook. From there you can go as deep as you want: Mapademics can drill into specific job postings, course- and syllabus-level skills, and more.

Already at work across Tennessee

This isn't a cold introduction. Mapademics and Coursedog have been partnered across Tennessee for some time, helping institutions tackle one of the state's hardest and highest-stakes problems: transfer evaluation and articulation.

That work spans the state's governance structures — Tennessee Board of Regents institutions, the locally governed institutions, and members of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association. Campuses we're currently working with include Volunteer State Community College, Tennessee Tech University, and Austin Peay State University, with significant transfer work underway across them.

It connects directly to where the state is already heading. Tennessee has spent years building shared transfer infrastructure — the Tennessee Transfer Pathways, Tennessee Reverse Transfer, and THEC's Articulation & Transfer Council, which convenes the leaders who design these programs at colleges and universities across the state. The through-line is the same one behind this report: when you can see the actual skills inside a course or a program, you can make far better decisions about where a credit should transfer, where a program should evolve, and where a student's education is genuinely taking them.

Public or private, two-year or four-year, TBR or locally governed or TICUA — the underlying question doesn't change.

Built for the work TENNAIR members do

TENNAIR exists to foster cooperation among Tennessee's institutional research professionals, share methods and ideas of common interest, and support their professional development. This report drops straight into that work.

A provost can defend a program's value. An enrollment and marketing team can show ROI to prospective families. An IR or institutional effectiveness office can answer an accreditor with current labor-market evidence. A president can make a confident, specific case about workforce relevance. All from the same source of truth.

It is also a natural fit for the cooperation TENNAIR was built to foster. Members already share methods and benchmarks across public and private, two-year and four-year institutions. A common Skills & Workforce Readiness Report gives that community one more shared, comparable lens on how Tennessee's programs connect to Tennessee's economy.

The question isn't whether your programs have value. It's whether you can show it — clearly, specifically, and with the numbers to back it up.

No IT project. No spreadsheets. No cost.

This is the caliber of labor-market analysis that typically runs five figures from the major data providers. For TENNAIR member institutions, it is covered as a benefit of the partnership. No contract, no obligation.

There is also no integration to stand up and no months-long mapping exercise. Mapademics builds your report from your program and course information, aligns it to current labor-market data, then hands you the finished report and walks you through the highlights.

The report is a starting point rather than a product pitch. Institutions that go further with Mapademics get the full platform — job-posting-level labor-market reporting, course- and syllabus-level skills extraction, and evidence-based transfer articulation. And for institutions running Coursedog, that intelligence is embedded directly in curriculum workflows and public-facing catalogs through Coursedog Labor Market Insights, powered exclusively by Mapademics. Neither is a condition of claiming the report.

How to claim your report

The Skills & Workforce Readiness Report is available to every TENNAIR member institution at no cost. Here's how to get yours:

1. Submit a request using the link below.
2. Mention TENNAIR in your request so we know you're part of the TENNAIR community and can prioritize it.
3. We'll prepare your institution's report and set up a short, optional walkthrough of the highlights.

From classrooms to careers — together. Help your students, your faculty, and your board see exactly where your programs lead. Request your institution's complimentary report, and be sure to mention TENNAIR. Reach out any time at mapademics.com.

Sources: Tennessee Association for Institutional Research · Tennessee Lookout, "What to know about Ford's BlueOval City plant, 5 years later," July 2026 · Oracle, "Oracle Scales Up Nashville Offices," March 2026 · Greater Memphis Chamber, xAI · Volkswagen Group of America, North American Engineering and Planning Center · THEC, "Postsecondary Attainment in the Decade of Decision," 2025 Master Plan · THEC, "Tennessee Joins Multistate Effort," November 2025 · THEC, Tennessee Transfer Pathways