3 Introduction As the cost of higher education has risen, scrutiny on graduate outcomes has increased as well. Students, families, higher education administrators, and policy makers all want to understand the value of a college education. According to students and families, the reason most cited for enrolling in higher education is to improve the student’s job prospects (Gallup & Strada, 2017). As a result, students’ career readiness is a construct of utmost importance as it reflects the underlying workplace skills that have been presumably acquired through their college education. Unfortunately, as of 2018, only 43% of seniors felt prepared for their future careers (McGraw-Hill, 2018). Similarly, in a survey of 217 employers, 46% of respondents reported they had to provide remedial training to recent graduates to get them up to speed, and about one in five employers said graduates with four-year degrees needed what they referred to as workforce readiness training (Casner-Lotto, Rosenblum, & Wright, 2009). This state of affairs is quite costly for employers; expenditures of workforce training reached $82.5 billion in 2020 (Statista, 2021). On average, organizations spend $1,252 per employee to train and develop their workforces (ATD, 2016), and estimates indicate they are spending one-fifth of that on remedial training specifically for workforce readiness (Casner-Lotto, Rosenblum, & Wright, 2009). Promoting students’ career readiness, thus, is a pro-active, comprehensive and yet flexible approach to addressing this important issue for college students, their institutions, and their would-be employers. The purpose of this technical report is to share the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. The following sections will review the literature, providing context and support for each competency, followed by the methods used and results obtained during their development and validation; the technical report concludes with a discussion of future directions.
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