Best Practices

Recruiters are being flooded with AI-generated materials that make it difficult to distinguish real from fake candidates. We need to teach our students to use AI properly and ethically, in a way that doesn’t deprive them of their own voices and won’t make them blindly reliant on copy and pasting AI outputs.

California State University, Los Angeles has identified career-engaged teaching using the NACE career readiness competencies as a way to heighten the preparation of students for their careers while boosting student retention.

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s on-campus internship program is designed to help departments reimagine student employment as a more intentional and developmental experience by embedding career readiness skills directly into student work.

Last summer, Queens College incorporated the NACE Career Readiness Competencies into its summer internship program and used the NACE Competency Assessment Tool to quantify gains interns made.

Because Insperity has long-used behavioral-based interviewing to identify candidates’ qualities and experience, the transition to more skills-based hiring has been a relatively smooth one.

The University of Oklahoma 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.

When universities, employers, and students collaborate effectively, college graduates are better equipped to transition confidently into the workforce while strengthening the talent pipeline for the future.

In an effort to strengthen retention and quality of hire, Kiewit Corporation refined its college hiring strategy to place greater emphasis on career readiness skills.

The traditional approach that separates academic, personal, and career development isn’t working. Colleges and universities must break down silos so they can align the curriculum to employer needs, include projects that build skills and relationships in all their courses, and integrate career development into everything they do. Here are nine ways to inform and inspire how you can collaborate to help students succeed.

In 2015, as part of a college-wide strategic plan, the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at the University of Minnesota embarked on an ambitious journey to integrate career readiness into the undergraduate experience.

In spring 2023, the California State University Channel Islands Martin V. Smith School of Business & Economics launched a career readiness course that all business and economics majors are required to take.

The large-college winner of the 2025 NACE Career Services Excellence Award, the UConn Work+ Pilot integrated career readiness into on-campus student employment, enhancing the experience for more than 200 student employees and 40 supervisors.

Future Business Leaders of America has integrated the NACE Competencies into its collegiate programming to bridge a critical gap between classroom learning and the demands of the modern workforce.

To compete in the job market, students must be able to connect their experiences to skills and communicate that to potential employers. Infusing skill development across campus can achieve that. Jill Donovan, Brookdale Community College, discusses how her career center began the process of integrating career readiness campus-wide.

This past summer, Arup expanded its career readiness programming for summer interns by working with its internal learning and development team to implement a series of competency-focused workshops.

Shifts in the educational space dictate the need to revisit, revise, and reframe traditional practices to be relevant to the needs of current students.

The University of Illinois Chicago, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Career Development Office, winner of the 2024 NACE Career Readiness Excellence Award, designed an innovative eight-week, one-credit career strengths-based course for its students.

Northwestern Mutual shifting the focus of its internship program to development of career readiness competencies seemed like a natural progression since the company was already focusing on themes similar to those identified by NACE’s competencies.

The NACE Career Readiness Competencies can be a valuable tool to help faculty members demonstrate to administrators, students, and parents that what they do creates long-term value for students.

Winner of NACE’s 2024 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Excellence Award for colleges, the Georgia Tech Career Center’s Georgia Tech’s AuthenTECH Partnership initiative leverages staff to provide population-specific resources, expand programming, and cultivate partnerships to advance equitable career outcomes.

Winner of the 2024 Chevron Innovation Award, the Gregory S. Fehribach Center at Eskenazi Health empowers Indiana college students with physical disabilities to achieve equitable employment following graduation.

Faculty are a key source of career advice for students—with more than nine of out 10 saying students asked them for guidance in the past year, according to a new study conducted by NACE in collaboration with the American Association of Colleges & Universities and the Society for Experiential Education.

The Yale Office of Career Strategy enlisted the help of key partners to create an assessment tool that incorporates design-thinking principles and is available to everyone, not just Yale students and alums.

Strategic Approaches to Integrating Career Readiness Competencies, developed by the NACE Career Integration Task Force, identifies strategies and practices for integrating career readiness skills and competencies institution-wide and examines how career readiness informs skills-based hiring. The publication also identifies further areas for research.

To make McPherson College students aware of the skills they are developing during their campus jobs, Amy Beckman incorporated career readiness competencies into student job descriptions and supervision.

Getting faculty buy in, having liaisons in different departments, and having the faculty be program champions was the key to the success of Georgia State’s “College to Career” career readiness initiative.

While moving to a virtual world and with little experience using virtual tools, William & Mary career center staff connected students and alumni by creating the Professional Development Academy.