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The University of Oklahoma (OU) Career Center has been using the NACE Competency Assessment Tool since this past summer. Staff saw it as a viable device to help support their focus on developing their students’ competencies.
“The OU Career Center is leaning heavily into competency development and when I saw the demo of the tool, I knew it would be a great addition to our work. So far it has gone great,” reports Robin Huston, the career center’s executive director.
The career center is using the tool in a variety of ways. For example, in summer 2025, it gave the assessment to more than 4,000 incoming freshmen at the university’s New Sooner Orientation (NSO).
“The goal behind assessing that cohort was more about normalizing the language around the competencies from the earliest possible point in the student’s life cycle at OU,” Huston says.
“We also loved the idea of parents seeing that we are committed to competency development for all students.”
In addition to NSO, the career center is using the tool in select classrooms and student employment experiences on campus.
“We know that our students are gaining these competencies in multiple areas across campus, but they don’t necessarily know how to communicate that on a resume or in an interview,” Huston explains.
“With the tool, we are continuing to normalize the language around the competencies while also teaching them how to articulate their proficiency.”
The OU Career Center is currently focusing on marketing the tool to faculty and staff.
“On the faculty side, many have never heard of the ‘NACE 8’ and would never think that it has anything to do with the work they are doing in the classroom,” Huston says.
“This has always been a challenge for us. But when we can show them the tool and how they can use it with their students, there is always a lightbulb moment where they realize how big of a role they are actually playing with their students’ competency development.”
Huston says the biggest hurdle in implementing the tool has been expanding its use by a broader audience across campus.
“To address this, we have obtained approval from the VP for Student Affairs to launch a pilot in fall 2026 with the division, which is historically one of the largest employers of our student workforce,” she points out.
“We will incorporate the pre- and post-assessment into each department’s workflow with their student employees. At the conclusion of the pilot, we plan to use the data to demonstrate the tool’s value in measuring student competency development gained through co-curricular experiences. We anticipate that this evidence will help incentivize additional departments and divisions across the university to adopt the tool.”
At the end of this year, the career center team is planning to send out a survey to the faculty and staff that have used the tool to get their feedback on their particular use case.
“We hope to find out where we might need to be doing a better job in our work trying to roll this out. But, so far, the data we have gathered has already been useful for our individual stakeholders,” Huston notes.
For example, she says that in fall 2025 her staff member who oversees experiential learning created and helped facilitate an experiential learning pilot with a faculty member in OU’s criminology department that brought employers into his classroom for project-based learning.
“For the pilot, they used the tool for pre- and post-assessment to show the value of that particular classroom experience,” Huston says.
“That data is now being used to market this idea to other faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences.”
The OU Career Center continues to get the word out about the NACE Competency Assessment Tool. A presentation about the tools at the annual Career Everywhere Symposium was well received by faculty and staff. Career center staff also identified every course on campus that involves career or professional development and met with faculty to see if they would like to incorporate the tool into their curriculum.
“Lastly, we created separate faculty and supervisor guides for using the tool, which are distributed to all stakeholders,” Huston adds.
“Our goal was to avoid situations where the pre- and post-assessments were administered without intentional conversations or meaningful integration into the curriculum or work experience. These guides have been very well received and have helped users understand the steps needed to ensure the tool is implemented correctly and as intended.”
