Fifteen years of work-based learning, and one conversation that wouldn’t let go.

If you want to understand what Cadre is for, it helps to know what came before it — because the platform is really just the answer to a problem we spent a decade and a half running into.

Fifteen years of getting students into real work

Since 2011, our team at NexGen Careers has been building work-based learning experiences for universities and colleges — first across North America, then Australasia, then Europe. Work sprints, international placements, live client briefs: whatever the format, the goal never changed. Get students doing real work, for real clients, before they graduate.

Done properly, that kind of experience is hard to argue with. Employers notice it. Students remember it. But it took a lot to make happen — faculty flying out to scope partnerships, students flying out for placements, our own team flying out to make sure both sides were set up to succeed. International experience, in practice, meant international travel.

Travel got harder. The need for international experience didn’t

Over the last several years, that travel got harder to justify. Cost, visas, carbon, tightening international-office budgets — especially since the pandemic reset how universities think about sending people abroad. None of that is controversial; most people working in international education have lived through some version of it.

What hasn’t changed is the reason universities wanted that experience in the first place. Employers still want graduates who’ve worked across a border, a culture, a time zone. If anything, that expectation has grown. So the gap widened on both sides at once: real demand for international experience, and a shrinking budget — in every sense — for the travel that used to deliver it.

A conversation Neil, Andreu and Carter kept having

Somewhere in the middle of that gap, the same conversation kept coming up — between Neil and Andreu, who between them had spent fifteen years building these experiences, and Carter, a sports management professor who’d been on the receiving end of exactly the barriers we were describing.

The conversation was simple, and it kept resurfacing in different forms: wouldn’t it be better if faculty could build these international experiences themselves — with the students, courses and resources they already had — rather than needing a flight, a visa or a travel budget to make one happen?

COIL already solved this. Faculty just couldn’t find each other

It turned out a model for exactly this already existed: Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL — two faculty, two cohorts, one shared project, run entirely online, no flights required. It’s been around for well over a decade, and where it’s been done properly, it works.

So the problem was never the model. It was finding the right partner. A professor in Ohio and a professor in Oslo might make a genuinely brilliant match — overlapping term dates, complementary courses, real shared interest — and simply never cross paths, because there was never a reliable way for either of them to find the other.

COIL didn’t have a matchmaking problem because it was a bad idea. It had one because nobody had built the introduction.

So we decided to build the introduction

Cadre exists to do one thing well: find you the right faculty partner, and make the introduction personally. Not an algorithm returning a list of vague possibilities. Not a directory you have to work through cold. A real look at your course, your calendar and your goals, and a real conversation with someone on the other side who might genuinely be a fit.

Everything else — the frameworks, the templates, the experience design that turns a good match into a real shared project — we already knew how to do, from fifteen years of doing it the harder way. What was missing was the first step: two people who should be working together, actually finding each other.

That’s what we’re building.