A Roadmap for What’s Next: NPSMA’s Strategic Plan Moves Us from Vision to Action

By Terri Woodburn, NPSMA President

Where should NPSMA be five years from now? And what will it take to get there?

Those questions sparked a process that brought voices from across the NPSMA community together to think about our future. The result is the NPSMA Strategic Plan 2026-2031, a roadmap shaped by you – the people who know our organization, our programs, and the Professional Science Master’s community best.

But we didn’t want to create a plan that simply sits on a shelf. We wanted a plan we could put to work.

We Started by Listening

Our strategic planning process began in late 2025 with an intentional effort to listen, learn, and look ahead. Through Board visioning, member input sessions, conversations with our Workforce Advisory Council, leadership consultations, surveys of committees and personnel, and an organizational alignment exercise, we asked our community to help us think about NPSMA’s strengths, challenges, and biggest opportunities.

Those conversations lead by 2025 President, Meghan Dovick, and 2026 Director of Strategic Initiatives, Kristin Kuter, gave us something incredibly valuable: a clearer picture of where NPSMA can make a difference.

They also reinforced that NPSMA is still uniquely positioned to connect people and ideas across the PSM and broader STEM graduate community. We bring together academic programs, industry partners, students, alumni, and other stakeholders around a shared goal: preparing STEM professionals with the technical knowledge and professional skills needed in a rapidly changing workforce.

That became the foundation for our vision of NPSMA: to strengthen our role as the national endorsement organization for workforce-aligned STEM graduate programs and to become a trusted resource hub and thought leader that helps drive successful graduate program development.

Turning Big Ideas into Clear Priorities

From all that listening and discussion, our direction began to take shape around three strategic anchors: Financial Resiliency, Organizational Capacity, and National Brand Authority, with industry engagement serving as a critical driver connecting our work.

Those anchors led to five priorities for the next five years:

Strengthen digital infrastructure and unified branding
Expand industry engagement and workforce partnerships
Diversify revenue and funding sources
Build organizational infrastructure and knowledge systems
Position NPSMA as a national convener and thought leader

They are ambitious priorities, and that is intentional. We believe strongly in the PSM model and in NPSMA’s potential to elevate its impact nationally.

But ambition needs action.

So, How Do We Get There?

That’s where our Strategic Plan Implementation Guide comes in.

The Implementation Guide created by 2026 President, Terri Woodburn, with input from the Board of Directors, takes the big-picture vision of the Strategic Plan and turns it into a practical path forward. It identifies actions, responsibilities, timelines, and ways to measure progress. Our work will move through three phases, starting with foundation building in 2026 (already well underway!), expanding our reach and capacity in 2027–2028, and advancing toward stronger national leadership and sustainability in 2029–2031.

And we’ll keep checking our progress along the way. Regular reviews will help us celebrate what’s working, learn from what isn’t, and adjust as new opportunities emerge. In other words, the plan gives us direction without preventing us from evolving.

Now Comes the Exciting Part!

A strategic plan can map the destination, but people create the momentum to get there. That means this isn’t just a plan for the NPSMA Board or our committees. It’s a plan for our entire community.

Whether you lead a PSM program, serve on an industry advisory board, teach or mentor students, hire PSM graduates, volunteer with NPSMA, or simply believe in the value of workforce-connected graduate education, there is a place for you in what comes next.

Get involved. Share your expertise. Connect us with partners. Participate in NPSMA committees and events. Bring us your ideas. Help us tell the PSM story!

Whether you can lend your expertise and time to a committee or just want to explore our Strategic Plan and priorities, contact 2026 President Terri Woodburn (terriw@ku.edu) or NPSMA Operational Manager, Derek Payne (npsma@npsma.org) to learn how you can engage.