UConn’s Center for Career Readiness and Life Skills created an AI Committee to develop a sustainable, intentional strategy for integrating AI into career services in ways that support student learning, staff confidence, and employer/alumni engagement.

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.

Affirmation from career center staff shifted a conceptual spark into a departmental priority allowing the Sophomore Career Accelerator to launch as a signature initiative at Muhlenberg College.

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.

For decades, the story we told students was linear: pick a major, graduate, land a job, climb the ladder. That story has changed; higher ed needs a non-linear approach to career services to evolve from transactional offices to adaptive talent ecosystems.

Moravian University’s Elevate program aligns the school’s academic strengths with clear, tangible career and life outcomes, integrating leadership and teamwork development, experiential learning, global perspectives, and career preparation across the undergraduate experience.

Carnegie Mellon’s Career and Professional Development Center created a custom Google sheet dashboard to track career fair registrations and provide information that helps staff drive toward goals.

The expectations of career services in higher education have never been greater. Families, students, and institutional leaders are asking tough questions: What support do you offer students in finding jobs after graduation? How will a degree translate into a meaningful career? What is the return on investment for a college education? The answers to these questions are complex, but they point to a broader shift in our field that calls for systemic transformation rather than incremental improvement.

The small employer winner of the 2025 NACE Recruiting Excellence Award, heritage Moss Adams’ (now Baker Tilly) Summer Internship Experience is designed to build a strong pipeline of skilled career professionals who will elevate the profession and the firm.

The Olinde Career Center at LSU launched Talking Tiger Talent as a way to modernize and scale the center’s employer outreach efforts.

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 North Dakota State University Career and Advising Center team has found that its Employer Town Halls held via Zoom are a great way to disseminate information in a different format than just an email.

Hybrid and in-person remain the preferred work modalities of employers for both their overall and entry-level positions, which matches the ways students prefer to work, NACE research has found.

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.

Hyster-Yale Materials Handling is developing a pre-onboarding program to engage and build excitement among its interns prior to their start date next summer.

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.

Matt Purdy of Murray State advises career services professionals to think about the resources they are trying to obtain and find data that not only align with what they are asking for, but to connect them to the priorities of their administration or institution.

The Georgia Tech Career Center, large-college winner of the 2024 NACE Career Services Excellence Award, hired eight new staff members across various functional areas within the office in a process that aligned with the institute’s DEI Blueprint to, in part, closely reflect the demographics of Atlanta.

The employer winner of the 2024 NACE Technology Excellence Award, Freese and Nichols implemented talent acquisition platform Yello and modified its roles and processes related to its on-campus career fair strategy to significantly increase its university hiring.

The University of Dallas career development office listened to student feedback to pivot from texting students career-related information to sending messages via email. The results have been impressive.

Despite calls to “return to the office” from employers and the prevailing media narrative, the hybrid work modality appears here to stay.

In an ever-evolving landscape, career services needs to adapt and innovate. Here, Hassan Akmal discusses how career services can reimagine itself to meet the needs of students and alumni.

Research conducted by NACE and The Center for the Study of HBCUs underscores how important it is for companies to conduct audits to assess gaps and inequities in their recruiting efforts.

College graduates in their early professional careers report significant mental health issues and view their jobs as a contributing factor. How can employers and colleges provide support?

Schools that conduct an annual FDS to capture information on how their new college graduates fare following graduation can benefit their own institutions and demonstrate the value of higher education.

Career services professionals should know the key points of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and how they can ensure their institutions are in compliance with FERPA’s requirements.

Many career services professionals are asked to prescreen candidates for employers—to identify their “best” students. So, too, are faculty members. Beyond a host of ethical issues involved in such a request, there are legal implications.

In today’s marketplace, college students may be offered a wide variety of employment opportunities. The following information should help career services professionals advise their students on the nature of these opportunities.