How Mississippi made locally led coaching happen statewide
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Growing up, Courtney Taylor lived the problem she now is trying to solve.
Taylor was good academically in school and destined for college and a traditional path to a successful career. Meanwhile, her twin brother struggled in the classroom and, Taylor says, “never found his foothold.
“Because he wasn’t going to continue his education,” she said, “they did not know what to do with him.”
Today, Taylor is executive director of AccelerateMS, the state of Mississippi’s workforce development agency, which was established in 2021 to align the state’s education, training, and economic initiatives. The agency embeds dedicated career coaches in public high schools throughout Mississippi and guides students in exploring education and career paths, helping them to identify high-wage, high-demand jobs and connecting them with local employers.
“It’s kind of the ultimate problem that we’re trying to solve with career coaches,” Taylor said. “We need more students going into these fields of high quality, high wages, high demand, and less of them going into fields that maybe don’t have as much need or don’t pay as much.”
The program places a career coach in every public high school that requests one. Currently, 204 schools have a career coach — about 90 percent of public high schools in Mississippi.
The AccelerateMS coaching program is well-aligned with the Principles for Quality Education-to-Career Guidance, which have been defined and endorsed by education and workforce leaders. The AccelerateMS model provides personalized coaching to students that supports them in mapping their education-to-career pathways, and this guidance includes information about high-wage, high-demand industries and the postsecondary training needed to pursue these opportunities.
Additionally, students and coaches create education and career plans, and coaches also help students build their professional networks through job shadowing and other industry connections.
“It’s kind of the ultimate problem that we’re trying to solve with career coaches. We need more students going into these fields of high quality, high wages, high demand, and less of them going into fields that maybe don’t have as much need or don’t pay as much.”
— Courtney Taylor, executive director of AccelerateMS
At an October convening in Washington, D.C., where Strada released the 2026 State Opportunity Index, more than 300 education and industry leaders from 36 U.S. states learned from one another about how states are connecting education after high school with economic opportunity. At the event, Taylor shared how Mississippi recognized the need for career coaches in high schools and focused on local and regional needs to implement the program statewide:
- Focus on the end goal to navigate solutions in a complicated education-to-work system.
AccelerateMS works at the intersection of K-12 education, postsecondary education and training, and workforce development. That’s why Taylor says the organization’s “main priority is to coordinate a very disjointed system.”
Career coaches are not school employees; rather, they are employed by regional organizations rooted in the communities they serve.
“What we didn’t want to do was house this program somewhere where it got confusing, where we started making the coaches do random college and career readiness classes or bus duty or whatever,” Taylor said. “So we’re really proud that we’ve been able to keep it separated from the infrastructure, yet the humans have incorporated it very well.”
- Prioritize community needs, regional economies, and local decision-makers.
AccelerateMS organized the program to put local needs first, and as a result the career coaches are serving the needs of the state.
The career coaches are hired through grants to regional organizations that are selected for their knowledge of their region, their connection with and understanding of the local economy, and their demonstrated experience in managing grants. Even the coaches’ presence is a local decision — a public high school has to opt into the program before it is allotted a career coach.
“We’ve established a program that is locally led, locally managed, but working together with the state as a whole,” Taylor said.
- Empower career coaches with labor market information they can interpret for students.
In a program so reliant on individualized interactions, hiring the right career coaches might be the most important component of success.
While the job description for AccelerateMS career coaches does not require a college degree (“We didn’t want to continue to push that narrative that you have to go to college and that’s the only path to success,” Taylor said), it does require an ability to interpret labor market information to high school students.
Finding people who want to help young people chart their futures is the easy part, Taylor noted, even with career coach salaries in the mid-$50,000s. But the more challenging ingredient is finding prospects with an ability to communicate data to students in a format they understand.
“It remains a challenge to educate the people who want to be in the schools working with the kids on the data they need,” Taylor said. “How do you get the information directly to the individual who needs it?”
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