California State University Northridge (CSUN) engaged Endertech to redesign and redevelop Pathways, the university’s online career exploration and planning application. The new platform needed to support more than 40,000 students plus faculty, staff, and alumni, while shifting the experience from static content to an engaging, inquiry-based journey that connects education to future careers.
Endertech delivered a Drupal-based web application with personalized dashboards, an API-powered Interest Profiler, social Q&A features, structured academic and occupational data, and campus-wide single sign-on. After launch, CSUN retained Endertech to support and evolve the platform for nearly ten years.
Client Context
CSUN’s Career Center runs the Pathways program as a core component of the university’s career development strategy. Pathways is designed to help students:
Discover personal strengths and interests
Explore academic majors and related occupations
Prepare for jobs, internships, and graduate opportunities
Connect educational choices with long-term career goals
The audience is large and diverse, including:
40,000+ undergraduate and graduate students
Tseng College (extended learning) students
3,800+ staff and faculty
Alumni
Any new platform needed to handle this scale, respect higher-education accessibility standards, and fit into the university’s identity and authentication environment.
The Challenge
The existing Pathways site had become outdated in appearance, structure, and technology. Content had grown organically over time, resulting in fragmented information and limited support for the richer, more interactive experiences the Career Center envisioned. Specific challenges included:
Outdated UX and IA: The legacy site no longer reflected the program’s mission or modern student expectations.
Fragmented data: Academic programs, occupations, and career content existed in multiple formats and locations, making it difficult to reuse across features.
Limited interactivity: Traditional, transmission-style content made it hard to support inquiry-based learning, reflection, and peer interaction.
Campus-wide access needs: The platform had to serve thousands of authenticated users while integrating with CSUN’s existing identity systems.
Accessibility and performance: As a public institution, CSUN required adherence to accessibility standards and reliable performance under heavy usage.
The Opportunity
CSUN’s team saw the redesign as an opportunity to reposition Pathways as a true learning environment rather than just a content repository. Together, we aimed to:
Make career exploration more interactive and student-driven, using inquiry and reflection rather than one-way content.
Connect academic programs, occupations, and opportunities in a structured, reusable data model.
Use personalized dashboards and activity tracking to encourage ongoing engagement, not one-time visits.
Lay a scalable technical foundation that could support years of enhancements, experiments, and new modules.
Endertech’s Role
Endertech was selected to lead both the design and engineering phases of the Pathways redesign. Our role included:
Product and UX strategy grounded in an inquiry-based learning vision
Information architecture and content modeling for academic, occupational, and career resources
Technical architecture, development, and deployment on Drupal 8
Integration with external APIs and CSUN’s authentication environment
Data import processes for curriculum and related records
Long-term hosting support and ongoing feature enhancements
Our Approach
Two-Phase Delivery
The university’s Scope of Work defined a clear two-phase approach:
Phase 1 – Planning & Design: Site planning, user research, wireframes, interface design, and alignment on the inquiry-based learning model.
Phase 2 – Implementation: Drupal implementation, custom module development, integrations, testing, and deployment.
User-Centered, Inquiry-Based Design
Drawing on research and stakeholder interviews, the combined team developed user personas that captured student goals, behaviors, and pain points. These personas informed key design principles:
Encourage engaged thinking and critical inquiry
Support reflection and planning, not just information retrieval
Foster a sense of ethical citizenship and community in the platform
Promote an entrepreneurial spirit—helping students take action on their goals
Practically, this meant prioritizing features like questions, dashboards, milestones, and progress indicators, rather than static pages alone.
Choosing Drupal as the Foundation
The project required managing a large corpus of structured content—academic programs, occupations, career resources, and more—along with custom data imports and interactive features. Drupal 8 was selected as the core platform because it:
Supports flexible, relational content modeling through custom content types and taxonomies
Provides robust tools for permissions, roles, and user management
Integrates well with external APIs and university identity systems
Offers a maintainable path for long-term enhancements and module development
We began with a base Drupal 8 installation and Git repository, establishing a modern development workflow and version control from day one.
What We Delivered
1. Drupal Platform & Architecture
Set up a Git-backed Drupal 8 installation as the core application.
Defined custom content types and taxonomies for academic programs, occupations, modules, and activities.
Implemented a modular site structure that aligned with the Scope of Work, including:
Homepage / Header & Footer
My Career Plan
Academic Program Module
Occupation Module
Campus Connections Module
Real World Experience, Job Search Preparation, Job Postings
Additional career planning and resource modules
This architecture gave CSUN a consistent, extensible framework while still allowing each module to surface information in ways tailored to its goals.
2. Data Migration & Academic Program Imports
The effectiveness of Pathways depended on high-quality, reusable data. Endertech implemented:
A CSV-based import process for academic programs from spreadsheets provided by CSUN.
Content normalization so curriculum and career data could be leveraged across multiple modules, searches, and student tools.
Processes to transfer large volumes of curriculum and related records into Drupal content types.
By structuring this data up front, CSUN gained a stable foundation for present features and future enhancements such as advanced search, recommendations, and analytics.
3. Personalized Student Dashboard
To transform Pathways from a static site into a personal career companion, we implemented a personalized dashboard for each user. The dashboard:
Displays a grid of activities that students can complete as part of their career journey.
Provides direct links to Majors, Occupations, Opportunity Activities, the Interest Profiler, and the "My Plan" activity area.
Surfaces progress and activity status, encouraging continued engagement, reflection, and action.
This design supports key goals of keeping students engaged, helping them see their progress at a glance, and nudging them toward next steps—whether in the application or in real-world interactions with counselors and advisors.
4. Interest Profiler Integration & Activity Tracking
A central interactive feature of the new Pathways platform is the Interest Profiler, which helps students align their interests with academic and career options. Endertech implemented a workflow that:
Obtains Interest Profiler questions from an external API.
Guides students through completing the questionnaire within Pathways.
Displays results and interpretations immediately after submission.
Allows students to save results to their profile, updating related activity statuses.
Surfaces saved results on the dashboard, tying them into ongoing planning and exploration.
This integration connects self-assessment data with the broader Pathways content—academic programs, occupations, and opportunities—supporting informed, personalized exploration.
5. Interactive Q&A and Social Features
To promote inquiry and peer interaction, we implemented an interactive Q&A capability within Pathways. Features include:
Creating and editing questions and answers
Threaded replies for deeper conversations
Upvote and downvote functionality to surface useful contributions
These tools support Pathways’ vision of learning as conversation rather than one-way instruction, enabling students to ask real questions and learn from counselors, staff, and peers.
6. Campus-Wide Access & Single Sign-On
Because Pathways is tightly integrated into CSUN’s student services, the platform needed to work seamlessly with existing authentication systems. Endertech implemented single sign-on (SSO) using SAML, allowing students to move between Pathways and related career applications while maintaining a single authenticated session.
This reduced friction for students and administrators alike, while aligning with the university’s security and identity management practices.
7. Accessibility, Performance, and Admin Tools
As part of meeting CSUN’s requirements, the platform was built with:
Accessibility considerations in templates, navigation, and content structure to support compliance with applicable standards.
Performance-conscious Drupal configurations appropriate for high volumes of authenticated traffic.
An admin design and management system that lets Career Center staff manage users, content, and modules without needing developers for day-to-day updates.
Complexity Handled
The Pathways engagement required Endertech to manage real-world institutional and technical complexity, including:
Large-scale data migration: Designing and executing CSV-based imports of academic programs and related curriculum data into Drupal.
Custom Drupal engineering: Multiple content types, activity tracking, and admin interfaces tailored to CSUN’s workflows.
External integrations: Connecting to an Interest Profiler API and integrating results into user profiles and dashboards.
Enterprise authentication: Implementing SAML-based single sign-on consistent with university identity standards.
Social interaction features: Building Q&A, voting, and threaded replies with appropriate roles and moderation paths.
Accessibility & performance constraints: Ensuring the solution would be usable and responsive for a large, diverse higher-education audience.
Results & Business Value
While CSUN’s internal metrics are not public, the project’s outcomes are clear in qualitative terms:
A modern Drupal-based platform that centralizes curriculum, occupations, and career resources in structured, reusable forms.
An inquiry-based experience that encourages students to ask questions, reflect on their journey, and take action.
Personalized dashboards and activity tracking that keep students engaged with Pathways over time.
An Interest Profiler workflow that ties self-assessment to concrete academic and career exploration.
Streamlined access through single sign-on, making Pathways feel like a natural extension of CSUN’s digital campus.
A scalable technical foundation that has supported ongoing enhancements and nearly a decade of continued partnership between CSUN and Endertech.
Why This Work Matters
The Pathways project illustrates how thoughtful design and solid engineering can transform an aging institutional site into a strategic platform for student success. For organizations in education and beyond, it shows that:
Complex, long-lived content can be modeled and migrated into a modern CMS to unlock new capabilities.
User-centered, inquiry-based design can increase the value students and stakeholders derive from existing curricula and resources.
Integrating APIs, SSO, and social features is achievable within a maintainable, enterprise-ready open-source framework.
A well-architected solution can serve as a long-term platform for growth, not just a one-time redesign.
Services & Capabilities Demonstrated
Custom Drupal development for higher education
UX strategy and inquiry-based product design
Data modeling, migration, and CSV import pipelines
API integration and user profile enrichment
Enterprise SSO integration (SAML)
Accessibility-conscious front-end implementation
Long-term application support and evolution
Have a Similar Challenge?
If you manage a complex educational or institutional platform—whether for career services, student success, or another mission-critical function—Endertech can help you rethink the experience, modernize the technology, and build a foundation for long-term growth.
Endertech provides: custom software development, Drupal development, systems integration, data migration, and ongoing hosting & support for organizations whose needs go beyond off-the-shelf solutions.