Career Readiness

What Is Career Readiness? It Isn’t College Readiness!

By Lee Chipps-Walton

ongoing and evolving concept that is fundamental to what all education should entail. We do not pretend to have all the answers, but feel confident that robust career readiness at least involves exploration, experiences, expertise, and expanded social capital. Stay in touch with us to continue to improve our career readiness model.

Before I say anything else, let me underscore what ‘career readiness’ is not – it is not, nor has it ever been, synonymous with ‘college readiness.’ For far too long these two completely different concepts – college readiness and career readiness – have been conflated and treated as if they were interchangeable. They’re not. At all. And, we do students a disservice when they get treated like they are. We at the Division of Career and Adult Education are in a process of revisiting and having important conversations around what career readiness should look like. We solicit your input on this process and would like to present a few ideas below that we know to be fundamental.

At least some of the confusion around “college and career readiness” stems from the fact that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and its legislative predecessors treat these two concepts – college readiness and career readiness – as a single concept for data reporting purposes. While college completion has numerous advantages, such as higher average salary and higher likelihood of employment, certainly there are a great many paths up the summit of career success that do not traverse through the corridors of a university. A myriad of studies have shown that academic performance does not always equate to career success.

Join us in re-imagining and re-defining what career readiness looks like. We view this as an Exploration

Career readiness must include informed decision making on the part of the student based on data (e.g., labor market data, educational outcomes data), information (e.g., the skills and tasks of a job, postsecondary training opportunities, institutional profiles, etc.), and access to qualified personnel that can provide customized guidance and counseling related to career and training options.

Experiences

Can we really say that a student is ‘career ready’ if they have never had a job, volunteered, or completed some type of work-based learning opportunity? Would a good coach send a player into a game that has never practiced?! Every single solitary student should experience some form of work-based learning before graduating high school and college. As you hopefully know, the benefits are significant and include increased high school graduation rates, boosted GPAs, increased employment rates, increased average starting salaries, increased postsecondary matriculation rates, and even lower youth crime rates.

Work-based learning is diverse and comes in many forms – internship, clinical experience, practicum, apprenticeship, pre-apprenticeship, schoolbased enterprise, volunteer or community service opportunity, or an industry project completed on campus with the help of industry professionals

or through a Career and Technical Student Organization.

What is more, should we really be graduating students that have never drafted a resume, written a cover letter, navigated a job posting site, or filled out a job application? These are essential experiences that contribute to career readiness!

Expertise

Employers want skills. That certainly includes academic skills (e.g., ability to process and express complex written ideas, ability to make calculations, and the ability to apply scientific principles contextually), but it also includes employability skills (communication skills, critical thinking skills, professionalism, etc.) and the technical skills of specific occupations. These well-rounded skill sets should inform what and how courses are implemented locally and at the state level.

Hiring is risky to employers. Each hire is a gamble and minimizing that risk, like through providing verified proof of expertise, has value. Traditionally, a college degree has served as a primary means of signaling intellectual ability and individual stick-to-it-ness. Both employers and those seeking employment have increasingly embraced other means of showing evidence of ability, such as industry certification, certificate of completion of an apprenticeship, licensure, letters of recommendation, skill endorsements, and work portfolios.

Expanded Social Capital

Consider all the jobs you have had. How many of them were because you knew someone or had some important social connection related to the job? It isn’t just what you know – it is who you know that matters. Social capital has been shown to be correlated with economic mobility and occupational attainment. Relationships matter. through work-based learning, mentoring, job shadowing, externships, informational interviews, guest speakers, and professional organizations. And ideally, the relationships would be deep (mentoring), broad (through diverse networking), lasting (through facilitating students staying in touch with industry professionals), and result in documentation (a letter of recommendation or an endorsement on an online professional network). There are numerous examples of educational institutions giving career readiness its deserved place in education. Sarasota County School District recently went through a process of defining what career readiness looks like for them. This includes students completing three or more of the following: two or more CTE courses, attaining an industry certification, earning the Florida Ready to Work credential, completing a work-based learning opportunity, participating in a Career and Technical Student Organization, earning two or more JROTC credits, and earning a passing score on the ASVAB.

For our students to be career ready, we must ensure education provides opportunities to explore career options, engagement with experiences of authentic work, means of developing and showcasing student expertise, and opportunities to expand student career-connected social capital. Career readiness should not be an educational afterthought – it should be a vital part of every student’s educational experience, a powerful strategy to uplift individuals from poverty, and a path towards Florida becoming one of the top ten economies in the world.

Please stay in touch with Lee Chipps-Walton, Manager of CTE Strategic Initiatives, about career readiness at Lee.Chipps-Walton@fldoe.org.

Helping students meet and build relationships with industry professionals should be treated as an essential part of education. This can happen