Learning Experience Design & Strategy
We come in as your thought partner to help you research, design, and build
Indeed, Career Currency Program | Lead with Levity
Our Process
Building Thinkers works best as an embedded thought partner. We join teams during moments of uncertainty, growth, or change — when clarity is essential and easy answers fall short.
Rather than presenting a rigid methodology, our work follows a repeatable way of thinking. We arrive with curiosity, discipline, and a commitment to build the right solution.
We do our best work with clients who are willing to ask hard questions, care deeply about outcomes rather than optics, and understand that meaningful learning takes thought, time, and care.
We work with leaders to get clear on what success actually looks like, what people need to think and do differently, and what constraints and tradeoffs are in play.
Before designing anything, we study the environment it has to live in — learner context, organizational culture, existing systems, and constraints.
We translate what we've learned into learning experiences, frameworks, tools, curricula, and artifacts — all grounded in learning science.
We stay close as work is built, tested, and refined — building internal capacity until your organization is ready to fully manage the experience.
Selected Work
Each engagement is different. The throughline is how we think, what we make visible, and what becomes possible as a result.
A 2.5-day immersive career development experience that surfaced barriers, expanded career pathways, and created direct visibility with senior leaders.
We surfaced and examined common myths about what it takes to advance, creating space to separate perception from reality. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of success, we helped participants explore multiple career trajectories — including staying in place, advancing vertically, or making strategic lateral moves.
Participants left with a structured thinking tool for future value and growth, a concise at-a-glance template articulating their value and direction, a career declaration script for forward-looking manager conversations, and shared language for discussing growth, readiness, and support.
Participants presented career declarations directly to senior leaders and sponsors, creating visibility, alignment, and advocacy beyond their immediate teams. The program supported individual agency, strengthened manager dialogue, and increased organizational awareness of emerging talent.
An end-to-end core curriculum framework — Agility Praxis Pathway — built around who students are becoming, not just what they need to know.
Agility for a changing world — helping students build the capacity to adapt, reflect, and navigate uncertainty. Praxis that bridges learning and lived experience. Pathways that create momentum across degrees. And student identity as an intentional outcome of education, not a byproduct.
A core curriculum framework anchored around Agility, Praxis, and Pathways — with courses like "How to Design Your Life," "How to Tell Your Story," and "How to Be Creative in Partnership with LLMs." We defined shared student identity outcomes and measurable competencies across the institution.
General education became a developmental journey — not a prerequisite hurdle. Students gained tools to reflect on their values, make sense of complexity, and connect learning to future pathways. The institution gained a shared framework for aligning curriculum, pedagogy, and purpose at scale.
A practical learning system that helped high-performing IT leaders articulate their value and have clearer, more grounded career conversations.
Making career value visible and discussable — not just in terms of skills or tasks, but across competencies, mindsets, and relationships. We connected reflection to real conversations and expanded what counts as progress, including deepening impact in place or making strategic lateral shifts.
The Career Currency Portfolio captured current and future value across competencies, mindsets, and relationships. Guided reflection activities clarified strengths and development priorities. A step-by-step Career Conversation Guide supported productive, forward-looking discussions with managers.
Originally developed with Indeed and later adapted as a keynote for IT women leaders at P&G. Participants gained clarity about how their work translates into opportunity, with concrete language for more confident career conversations. The shared framework respected individual agency while aligning with organizational realities.
An institution-wide competency model that made student identity outcomes explicit, measurable, and aligned to real-world expectations.
Making the implicit explicit — surfacing underlying beliefs about learning and development shaping decisions across the institution. Clarifying institutional intent around identities, capacities, and ways of thinking. Creating shared language for faculty, staff, and leaders.
An institution-wide competency model with observable behavioral indicators for capacities like growth mindset, collaboration, and ethical decision-making. It incorporated employer and industry partner input, included survey-based assessment, and provided coaching tools for academic support structures.
The institution gained greater coherence across curriculum, programs, and student support. The framework helps communicate clearly with employers by naming the competencies students develop and how they're assessed — creating alignment between student aspirations, institutional values, and workforce expectations.
Design in Action
This interactive installation — designed for a university's "Design Your Life" course — transforms a hallway into a thinking environment. Students engage with frameworks, contribute ideas, and see their reflections become part of the learning space itself.
Visual design, experiential learning, and physical space — working together to make thinking visible.
Work Worth Doing Together
How do we design this well, in a way that actually holds up?
→ You're likely in the right place.
How do we get this done as quickly as possible?
→ We may not be the right partner.
About Tracy Clark & Building Thinkers
Building Thinkers was founded by Tracy Clark to support organizations doing work where clarity matters and easy answers fall short.
Tracy's background spans startups and early ventures, R&D, higher education, institutional curriculum and competency design, leadership and career development, and large-scale learning systems. She was also the co-founder and CEO of an education technology platform that reached more than 1.5 million students.
Earlier in her career, Tracy worked as a bilingual educator in the United States and Mexico. That experience continues to shape her belief that learning systems must be designed with care for neurodiversity, context, and how human learning actually works.
Today, Building Thinkers partners with universities, Fortune 150 organizations, non-profits, statewide philanthropic initiatives, and innovation teams to expand what’s possible—challenging default settings, breaking old patterns, and building clearer, braver ways forward for long-term impact.
Building Thinkers utilizes a small, trusted network of senior collaborators whose expertise spans learning science, organizational psychology, design, and facilitation. Teams are assembled intentionally based on the needs of each engagement.
Clients often describe working with Building Thinkers as collaborative, rigorous, clarifying, and deeply human-centered. The work is research-informed, design-forward, and grounded in care for the people it serves.
From Our Partners
Tracy Clark is an outstanding partner in helping organizations learn and grow. She designs experiences that are both engaging and practical, creates environments where groups can align and move forward with energy, and develops tools that bring clarity to complex ideas. Her mix of insight, creativity, and human-centered focus makes her an invaluable asset.
Collaborating with Tracy on the design of How to Use Math in Real Life for SFBU was one of the most enjoyable and productive experiences of my career. Her ability to balance big-picture vision with attention to detail made our collaborations both productive and enjoyable. She elevated our conversations, helping us see how design choices would shape the student journey.
Tracy is leading the field in innovative and engaging professional learning opportunities. She is research-based, learner-centered, and knows precisely how to connect with educators in a way that resonates deeply with their practice. She is a creator and designer, carefully crafting learner experiences to leverage maximum impact — even creating her own tools and resources when the right one doesn't yet exist.
I met Tracy through being a guest on her podcast and immediately knew she was a synthesizer — meaning she could easily hear disparate parts of problems and bring them together to create a resonating solution. I asked her to help me with a complicated client project and she provided immense value. We quickly became a team and more importantly helped the client gain much needed clarity.
Tracy's expertise as an instructional designer, particularly in experience design, allows her to bring a high level of thoughtfulness to her work. The curriculum she crafted was not only engaging and fresh but also deeply inspiring. What sets Tracy apart is not just her profound knowledge, but also her approach to collaboration. Her energy is infectious, and she consistently goes the extra mile.
Her approach is human-centered, and she utilizes knowledge of neuroscience, social science, and organizational development methods to create programs that engage learners and foster growth. Tracy's attention to detail and commitment to excellence shines through in all her work. Her dedication to continued learning and genuine willingness to make a positive impact sets her apart in her field.
Start the Conversation
If you're navigating complexity, shaping a new idea, or trying to make sense of what comes next — this first conversation is a chance to explore your context and see whether working together makes sense. No pitch. No pressure.
Walking through an idea still forming. Exploring fit. Getting clarity on what support would actually be useful.
