Career Development Center Director Jill Boatright was faced with a challenge: she wanted to incorporate career competency education in a more structured way, but her staff was already stretched thin. Plus, they didn’t have the resources to start an entirely new initiative, especially on such a vast topic. Jill says she found the Career Ready Guide to be the solution, “It’s a really great tool… a tremendous time saver!”

Jill believes a big part of student career competency development is learning to articulate the competencies. “The earlier you can get a student thinking about the competencies, the better they will be at articulating them when they need to.” Using the guide, Jill and her team were able to reach students earlier in their college career. Many students in the 22-40 age range also benefitted from the guide, finding it extremely helpful in better understanding the competencies.

The guide’s plug-and-play format is a major plus since Jill points out it doesn’t require additional staff and it takes no time to get up to speed and use it. The guide allowed her to “incorporate something vast into what we are already doing… without having to build content from the ground up.” Jill’s advice to other schools considering implementing the Career Ready Guide on campus, “Find places where you can plug it in rather than thinking ‘how can I develop a brand new initiative around this?”

“Seeing the value they got out of it, I think it really made me pause and think. There can be a really meaningful impact on students that you may assume already know this stuff, and while they probably know it one way or another, they don’t know it in as direct a way as we may have assumed.”