Hats & Ladders helps young people aged 14-24 with career discovery (“Hats”), skill identification (“Ladders”), and next steps (“climbing”). They deliver curriculum, formative and diagnostic assessments to K-12 districts and workforce development agencies, including municipal and nonprofit organizations.
“Everyone has a unique mix of likes, dislikes, and abilities," said Doug Stein, Director of Engineering at Hats & Ladders. "We help young people discover careers that fit their profile and plan a path to get there.”
→ Decouple authoring, delivery, scoring, and reporting
→ Support richer, more engaging item types
→ Scale from 100,000 to millions of learners
→ Power adaptive testing
→ Reduce PII exposure and support FERPA requirements
When Doug Stein first joined Hats & Ladders, he quickly spotted that the content and engineering teams were tightly coupled. And their workflow was far from smooth.
Authoring lived in Airtable, while publishing, scoring, and reporting ran through separate ETL (export, transform, load) processes and multiple custom applications. The result: content authors were flying blind.
“The content team couldn’t see or review their work until publishing was complete—and that took 1–3 hours,” said Doug.
That meant slow iteration, a lack of flexibility, and constant back and forth between teams.
On the learner side, the experience was also constrained: only a small set of “step types” (or question types), no way to save progress and pick up where they left off, no ability for students to make multiple attempts, and the Hats experience couldn’t meaningfully elicit responses.
Instead of building an assessment engine, I proposed partnering with Learnosity and accelerating the release date by one year: release a year earlier, earn an additional year of revenue.
Director of Engineering at Hats & Ladders
While Hats & Ladders could serve their single largest customer in the municipal workforce space using their original system, it prevented them from growing.
“Our biggest customer provided predictable revenue but a narrow focus,” said Doug. “We built a solution optimized for them, not for scale. We struggled to balance their specific needs against our broader company goals. Ongoing compromises tend to accumulate technical debt.”
They saw a big opportunity to expand into the K-12 space at scale, but to do that—without compounding tech debt or increasing headcount—they had to find an answer to some big questions.
“Could we decouple content and engineering so they could have parallel roadmaps?” said Doug. “Could we support multiple authoring teams, both internal and external, to manage offerings for different markets with similar needs?”
To make the change, they needed help. And they needed a solution that could meet a list of specific requirements.
Their main goal was to untangle the tight connection between the content and engineering teams. That meant moving to a decoupled, API-driven approach—so authoring, delivery, scoring, and reporting could evolve independently, using best-of-breed tools rather than a single homegrown solution.
The career readiness company also needed a platform that could really grow with them. The new system had to scale from 100,000 users up to millions, all while keeping costs low enough to sell to smaller groups profitably.
On top of that, they needed to deliver more advanced assessment styles—like moving from the old, fixed-form ladders to adaptive assessments. Compliance with legal environments like FERPA was also essential, requiring minimal personal data exposure.
Lastly, the content team wanted to expand their step types, so the new platform could move past simple formats and bring in richer, more engaging items.
“We only had true/false, multiple-choice, and short-text questions,” said Doug. “Our content team wanted more, including drag-and-drop, visual items, gamified items, documents, and audio/video uploads.”
Luckily, Doug had used just such a solution in a previous workplace. Years earlier, he’d worked on a project where a publisher services company needed to author thousands of items for a Singaporean publisher. At the time, he discovered a fast track.
“Instead of building an assessment engine, I proposed partnering with Learnosity and accelerating the release date by one year: release a year earlier, earn an additional year of revenue,” said Doug.
Doug knew from personal experience that Learnosity’s technology lets product teams embed assessment capabilities directly into their own products.
For Hats & Ladders, that meant they could build the general platform experience in-house—like rostering, management, and course/content design—while relying on Learnosity to handle assessment reliably.
“We were able to focus on the wider solution because we could assume the inner loop—presenting an item and capturing a response—was robust and simple for users,” said Doug.
Learnosity also gave Hats & Ladders a new foundation for content operations: a unified item bank and modern authoring flow, instead of disconnected tools and painful ETL processes.
Learnosity’s white-label engine embedded seamlessly into Hats & Ladders’ platform. Doug and his team used the Author API in their CMS, the Items API for learner delivery, and the Reports API for educator and administrator insights—crafting an experience that looked and felt like Hats & Ladders throughout.
“Because it’s API-driven, we retain our distinctiveness when integrating with Learnosity,” said Doug.
Hats & Ladders’ transformation wasn’t just powered by technology, it was guided by Learnosity’s experts—who provided support that was both tactical and strategic.
“Not only does Learnosity have an excellent help desk for tactical issues, but the broader Customer Success team helps us map our strategy with best practices onto Learnosity capabilities,” said Doug.
With the combination of Learnosity’s technology and expertise, the work quickly became more than a standard implementation.
“It wasn’t simply an integration, but a step change enabled by Learnosity,” said Doug.
In just nine months, Hats & Ladders moved from contract to launch—shipping a rebuilt platform, complete with all new content, in time for their biggest annual user surge.
The impact showed up immediately where it mattered most: learner experience and support load during peak usage.
“In previous years, thousands of tickets were generated because scores didn’t appear or work was lost when internet connections dropped,” said Doug. “After Learnosity, that support load disappeared.”
That kind of reliability matters in everyday moments, not just during test-day traffic spikes. Now young learners in New York City could travel on the subway without fear of losing their work if they disconnect from the internet.
Hats & Ladders also used Learnosity to move beyond traditional question types to create more immersive, engaging experiences.
“We offer gamified items implemented as Learnosity custom questions—role-playing, scenario-based games where the student makes decisions and the game responds,” said Doug. “They’re very popular with students, who tell us the games help them imagine what parts of a job are really like.”
For the content team, the win was speed and confidence. Instead of authoring in one place and hoping it looked right after a long publishing cycle, they could iterate rapidly because they could see and refine items as they authored them.
“The feedback loop from first draft to production-ready dropped from weeks to days,” said Doug.
And strategically, Learnosity helped Hats & Ladders expand the business without expanding their headcount: they grew from a single seasonal workforce product to multiple offerings across workforce and K-12—all built on one underlying assessment engine.
“We didn’t need to increase the size of the development team,” said Doug. “Learnosity is an amplifying technology.”
We didn’t need to increase the size of the development team. Learnosity is an amplifying technology.
Director of Engineering at Hats & Ladders
With the foundation in place, Hats & Ladders is scaling AI-assisted content creation using Author Aide, which is especially useful for maintaining consistency across a spiraled curriculum where the same topics appear at multiple levels.
They’re also exploring adaptive assessment options (specifically item adaptive and testlet adaptive models) for two reasons: to keep learners in “the zone” and to move toward defensible measurement of growth in self-efficacy for career development over time.
Because their plans will keep evolving, Hats & Ladders need more than a vendor—they need a collaborator, so their platform never falls behind. That’s Learnosity.
“It’s a partnership: we each have our own roadmaps, but Learnosity shares what’s coming so we can weave it into ours. And we share what we need, whether it’s something already under development or requires the APIs to stretch in new ways.”
Hats & Ladders started in 2016 to help reimagine career education. Building off twenty years of developing award-winning educational games and interactive experiences, they created a platform designed to motivate teens and young adults to explore, experiment with, and prepare for a wide range of career pathways.
