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.

Jeff Crume, an adjunct professor of cybersecurity who has spent more than four decades in the IT industry, provides insight into the ways companies and college students are adapting to AI’s impact on the entry-level workforce.

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.

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.

Since the creation of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Buckeye Pathways Summer Internship program five years ago, career readiness has been a central priority.

NACE’s Career Services Benchmarks Quick Poll reveals the progress colleges and universities are making in implementing career readiness competencies on their campuses.

Despite all the information on hiring, it can be difficult to determine why some of our students are hired quickly and others are not. When interacting with students across majors and with different industry interests, career educators and recruiters often sum up behaviors expected on the job as professionalism, a tricky umbrella term that ignores the way that behavioral expectations may change from industry to industry—and can impact hiring decisions and new employee retention.

The goal of the LER Accelerator coalition and for the release of its recent white paper is to be a catalyst for faster growth of the adoption of learning and employment records.

The small college winner of the 2025 NACE Career Services Excellence Award, Furman University developed its “Four-Year Pathway,” a program that spans students’ undergraduate career and prepares them to enter the workforce.

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.

This article shares early findings from a three-year study on how students define and experience communication readiness as they prepare for the workforce.

When the University of Texas University Leadership Network launched in 2013, it had two main goals that remain in place today: to help students graduate in four years and to provide students who are under-resourced with an opportunity to participate in various forms of experiential learning without having to work.

The University of North Florida (UNF) has historically offered innovative programs, services, resources, and events to ensure students are successful and career ready by the time they graduate. This approach led leadership to embark on a new path at the intersection of UNF’s core functions and NACE’s career readiness competencies.

The College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington recently launched its Pillars Undergraduate Experience, a framework designed to prepare students for academic achievement and lifelong career success.

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.

There is a clear and persistent disconnect between how students and employers perceive students’ development of the competencies they need to be career ready as they enter the workforce.

Review the evidence for the reliability and validity of the NACE Competency Assessment Tool. This article also offers brief context for the assessment tool, outlines the methodology employed, and provides the final, top-line results of the study.

To produce career-ready graduates, the Lehman College School of Business intentionally equips its students with competencies through the promotion of applied learning in its three programs.

Despite the changes caused by COVID-19, some employers and educators have reinstituted traditional recruiting practices that may now present barriers to students impacted by the pandemic.

Although new college graduates looking to enter the workforce and employers hiring these graduates agree on which competencies are most important for job candidates to hone, their perception of student proficiency in them differs.

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.

New college graduates embrace the value of higher education, with 91% reporting that, if they had a chance to do it again, they would opt to pursue a college education.

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.

To prepare students for their transition to the workforce, career centers have to account for the standards of professionalism shifting over the past several years.

Through its Experiential Learning Platform™, Saxbys builds individualized academic partnerships to open cafes that provide exceptional paid experiential learning opportunities for students.

When asked to rate the career readiness competencies of college graduates in terms of “essential need,” employers view four as vital, according to results of NACE’s Job Outlook 2016 Spring Update.

NACE members share resources they have developed to communicate with college students and others about how to develop key competencies, known as the NACE Career Readiness Competencies, needed to be considered ready for the workforce.

New graduates and their potential employers can agree on which skills are most important for job candidates, but differ on how proficient new graduates are in those abilities.