5 Definition of Career Readiness in the Literature Career readiness, while defined and referred to somewhat variably in the literature, generally refers to the skills required to begin a career. According to Conley (2011), career readiness reflects the knowledge, skills, and learning strategies that are required to begin a career pathway, including common expectations about workplace conduct. Traditionally, particularly for the K-12 setting, that set of skills and knowledge has been defined in terms of math (reasoning), reading, and writing skills. Camara (2014) noted that “career readiness has not been defined as a measurable construct” (p. 21). Since then, Camara and colleagues have helped the assessment company ACT develop their College and Career Readiness suite of assessments referred to as WorkKeys. The assessment suite rests on four core areas: core academic skills, cross-cutting capabilities, behavioral skills, and education and career navigation skills (ACT, 2022). While most of the assessments in the WorkKeys suite assess traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic, the suite also measures soft, or what NACE calls core, skills through their set of competencies they have labeled as cross-cutting, invoking the transferable nature of these skills. WorkKeys also assesses behavioral and personality traits. Encompassing the range of academic, cognitive, and non-cognitive factors that affect one’s entry into the workforce, ACT has taken a wide approach to defining career readiness. OCTAE refers to the idea of career readiness as employability skills, which signals a wider audience than the college educated. As such, the office’s conception is broader than reading, writing, and arithmetic. OCTAE defines employability skills as a set of workplace skills (e.g., information use, systems thinking, technology), using applied knowledge (e.g., critical thinking, applied academic thinking), and having effective relationships (i.e., interpersonal skills and personal qualities). Based on OCTAE’s framework, ETS developed an assessment of career readiness, called HiSet, for adult learners entering the workforce without a high school degree (ETS, 2022). OCTAE’s framework is designed to address the entire spectrum of the national workforce, while NACE’s Career Readiness focuses on core, or transferable, skills for jobs that require at least a two- or four-year college degree. Though there is certainly overlap in the extant definitions, their variability stems from which skills are considered critical for beginning a career. Part of the reason for disagreement is due to different industries requiring different skills. For example, manufacturing jobs and sales jobs involve different kinds of activities and, as such, require somewhat different kinds of skills. Manufacturing positions may rely more on being able to follow instructions and read graphics for information, while a sales job may rely more on interpersonal skills, which are not usually measured by traditional reading, writing, and math assessments.
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