Career Readiness Needs an Architecture, Not an Add-On

In the first column in this series, I argued that career readiness cannot wait until graduation. In the second, “Career Readiness Should Be Developmental, Not Episodic,” I proposed that students should encounter progressively more challenging opportunities to connect learning and work—from seeing how knowledge operates in the world to exercising agency, tackling authentic problems and defending the choices they make.

But student initiative is not enough. If we want these opportunities to reach every student, universities need more than a collection of internships, projects, career programs and employer relationships. They need an architecture that makes opportunities visible, connects experiences over time, expands access to professional relationships and enables the institution itself to learn.

The pieces already exist across many of our institutions. The opportunity now is to connect them by design.

Better Choices for Students and Employers Alike

Career-connected learning is described primarily as a benefit to students. Employers and community partners also stand to gain.

The conventional recruiting model gives students and employers relatively limited information about one another. A career-connected architecture should help students build social capital. As technology makes it easier to apply for jobs—and easier for employers to screen applicants out—relationships and human connections may become even more important in making students visible to organizations.

Relationships should not be an accidental benefit available primarily to students who arrive with established networks. They should be an intentional and equitable outcome of career-connected learning.

Some students arrive with trusted adults who can help them interpret their choices. Many do not. A strong university cannot leave the path from coursework to career to the luck of having someone who can help make the connections.

The Graduate Futures Institute’s 2026 report “From Access to Graduate Success: The Next Phase of Social Mobility,” makes this inequity visible. Students do not enter the labor market with equal access to the networks, experiences and support that help graduates progress. An architecture that develops capabilities without also expanding relationships may leave some of the most consequential disadvantages untouched.

Students who explore multiple organizations and forms of work sharpen their sense of where they might contribute. They discover which problems energize them, which environments help them thrive and which capabilities they want to develop next. They can also learn what they do not want. Ruling out a particular career is a valuable outcome—especially when that occurs before graduation.

Employers, meanwhile, gain earlier and broader exposure to emerging talent. Rather than evaluating students only through applications and interviews, they can see how students frame problems, work across disciplines, respond to feedback, use new tools, navigate uncertainty and explain their choices. They also gain access to fresh questions and emerging perspectives.

Shared university infrastructure should make that exchange possible for smaller companies, nonprofits, public agencies and community organizations that cannot build separate programs. This is not simply a bigger talent pipeline. It is a better mechanism for mutual discovery and matching—and should produce better decisions on both sides.

Employers cannot simply supply a problem and wait for talent or free labor to emerge. As Dan Silverburg of Propel K20 told Inside Higher Ed, employers should “fund and co-design the experiences they say they want, not just show up to advisory meetings.” High-quality partnerships require explicit learning goals, manageable scope, clear boundaries around how student work will be used and practitioners who provide appropriate supervision and meaningful feedback. When students create substantial value for an organization, compensation should be an explicit consideration.

An Architecture, not an Accumulation

The goal is not to add dozens of new requirements to an already crowded undergraduate experience.

As IHE’s Colleen Flaherty reports, 69 percent of provosts identify staff capacity as a primary barrier to expanding work-integrated learning—more than cite employer interest or faculty support. This helps explain why the work remains difficult to scale.

Wake Forest University’s Andy Chan offers a useful response: Rather than assuming every authentic experience requires elaborate new infrastructure, institutions can begin by identifying what students already do that is close to experiential learning and make it more consequential through greater structure and reflection.

Course assignments, campus jobs, research, student organizations, community engagement and entrepreneurial work can become part of this architecture when augmented with skill building and reflection.

Career services have an essential role to play in this model—not only as providers of services near graduation, but as institutional architects and connectors. Their expertise can help faculty members, advisers and other university mentors create more coherent pathways across the student experience.

An architecture requires more than a collection of good programs. It requires connective tissue and clear responsibility for making opportunities visible and using evidence to improve the system. No single office needs to control this work, but the institution must take responsibility for the connections among its parts.

That connective function is frequently missing. The Business–Higher Education Forum’s 2026 playbook “Industry Partnerships That Last” reports that fewer than one in five higher education leaders believe their institutions are fully executing an industry-partnership strategy. The problem is not a shortage of willing employers or promising programs. It is the absence of capacity, coordination and shared infrastructure.

This is not an argument for making higher education narrower or reducing it to an immediate labor-market outcome. We should instead make the relationships among learning, work and human development richer, more reciprocal and more visible.

Connecting Experiences Over Time

Without an integrating layer, students may accumulate courses, projects, internships, jobs and credentials without understanding how those experiences relate to one another or how they themselves have changed as a result.

Students should be able to ask themselves, what have I experienced? What evidence have I produced? What have I learned about my capabilities and interests? How has my judgment changed? What do I want to try next?

The resulting progression will not be linear. Students will enter with different experiences, move at different speeds, revisit earlier questions and change direction. A strong architecture provides progression without prescribing one pathway.

The cycle is iterative: Experience leads to reflection; reflection informs choice; choice leads to a more demanding experience. That cycle is the foundation of continuous readiness.

Students and employers are not the only ones who should learn from these experiences. Universities should use what they observe—including recurring obstacles, capability gaps and changes within fields—to inform curriculum, advising, faculty development, technology investments and future partnerships.

That requires assessing more than participation. Counting internships, employer events, projects and credentials will not reveal whether students are developing stronger judgment or making better choices. Institutions should examine whether students can apply knowledge in unfamiliar settings, explain their reasoning, learn from feedback, produce evidence of their capabilities and identify meaningful next steps—and whether access is equitable and experiences improve over time.

From Career Readiness to Continuous Readiness

Career readiness should not describe a state students achieve shortly before graduation. Work will continue to change. Technologies will evolve, industries will reorganize and people will change roles and professional identities. The deeper objective is to help students become capable of remaining ready.

Beginning during the undergraduate experience, the university of the future will support learners across the full college-to-career continuum and through the many transitions that follow. It will create more opportunities for work in the flow of learning and learning in the flow of work.

This broader conception is consistent with the International Labour Organization’s 2026 flagship report, “Lifelong Learning and Skills for the Future,” which describes learning as occurring across education systems, workplaces and everyday life—and as contributing not only to employability but also to innovation, social inclusion, active citizenship and well-being.

The university of the future will help people return to learning, develop new capabilities, reconsider earlier choices and prepare for opportunities they could not have anticipated at graduation.

So what should a career-readiness architecture include? I’d start with the following and hope that readers will fill in the gaps. I think it starts with a coherent series of increasingly complex experiences through which students encounter possibilities, exercise agency, produce evidence, receive feedback, defend their choices, build relationships and determine what comes next.

Imagine an undergraduate experience in which every student has dozens of these opportunities. Then imagine that the university learns from each of them, improving the pathways, partnerships and support that the next student encounters.

That is how career readiness becomes more than a program added to the undergraduate experience. It becomes part of how a university prepares people not only to enter a changing world of work, but to continue learning and contributing throughout it.

Note: AI helped me find relevant research, pressure-test the argument and improve the writing. The ideas, judgments and conclusions are mine—as are any overly long sentences that survived the editing process.