Ask ten people on a college campus who they think is responsible for career navigation, and you’ll get ten different answers.
The Career Services office will tell you it’s them. Academic advisors will say they spend half their appointments fielding questions about whether a student’s major will lead to their dream job or if a specific course will lead to an industry credential. Financial aid counselors field ROI questions from students and their families in conversation about loans and tuition. Many faculty members will talk about career relevance with students and administration every time they update curricula, during office hours or in advising appointments. Workforce development offices often cultivate the employer relationships that generate internships and job placements. Student success teams track whether at-risk students are persisting, and career uncertainty is often a factor of why they aren’t. Every one of those functions touches career navigation. At most institutions, these areas don’t coordinate nearly as often as they should.
That’s a problem we saw firsthand at Athens State University. Our students, many of whom are adult learners and all of whom are transfer students, arrive with a sense of immediacy with regards to their next career. As one of the few institutions in the country specifically focused on helping transfer students complete their degree, we serve students who have started a degree somewhere else, often making many stops along the way. They come to Athens State determined to finish their degree and launch the career they’ve been dreaming of or upskill and move up the ladder in their current place of work. They’re older, often working and supporting families. They don’t have four years to slowly develop a professional direction; they need career navigation that is integrated, intentional and fast. What we’ve learned from trying to build intentional career navigation support is that the structural problem isn’t unique to us. It’s endemic to higher education, and it’s something more institutions will need to address if they want to help their students navigate an increasingly uncertain future.
Of course, higher education didn’t set out to make career navigation confusing, but it has evolved that way. Over the years, student services functions evolved independently, budgeted independently and were staffed by people with different professional training and different institutional reporting lines. Career services often reports to student affairs, but faculty advising is an integral part of academic affairs. Workforce development might report to the provost, a vice president for external relations or directly to the president. Each office has its own software, its own set of metrics and its own definition of success. As a result, the student in the middle of this org chart doesn’t experience it as a set of complementary services. Too often, they experience it as a series of separate conversations that never seem to add up to a coherent plan. Students get good advice about internships from career services or workforce development. They talk about courses and certificates with their academic advisor and a plan of study that leads to graduation with their student success coach, but no one is connecting those conversations to the student’s actual goal: a career that offers them a path to advancement and success.
The result is duplication, inconsistent student experiences and a tendency for career navigation to appear prominently in strategic plans while remaining functionally diffused in practice. Every institution has career outcomes in their mission statement. Far fewer have a designated owner of career navigation with cross-functional authority to make it coherent. Solving this problem is, at the end of the day, a question of governance. Who should own career navigation and, most importantly, what will that mean for students?
At Athens State, that has meant deliberately building connective tissue between functions that were never designed to talk to each other. It means having a shared vocabulary—career navigation as a defined institutional function, not just a phrase—and shared accountability metrics that cut across departmental silos. It means advisors in every part of the institution, including faculty, understand that their work is career work, whether or not their title says so.
It also means being honest about what human staff alone cannot do. Athens State is a non-residential campus serving commuter students, many of whom work full-time, take mostly online asynchronous courses and rarely come to campus. The notion that career navigation happens when a student walks into a career center during business hours is fiction for most of our students. Scaling personalized support to students who need it at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday requires tools and infrastructure, not just goodwill. For us, that meant creating a partnership with the nonprofit CareerVillage, whose career coaching tool is designed to be available wherever and whenever students need it. This partnership has not been just about developing another tool that students can opt into, it also meant intentionally embedding career coaching into curricula.
If you’re reading this and nodding, here’s where we’d suggest starting. First, audit the landscape honestly. Map every office and function that touches career navigation. Identify where the handoffs are and where they break down. Second, appoint an owner, a person or a cross-functional team with genuine authority to set standards and require coordination across the siloed offices that currently do this work independently. Third, build shared metrics because what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed, and right now most institutions measure career navigation in fragments. While we all may have tons of existing data about student career navigation, have we spent the time understanding where they overlap and compound? What do those metrics mean for the individual student? Are they graduating with not just a job but a start in their chosen career?
Changing how a university is organized is slow politically complicated work, but the students we serve, especially transfer students, working students and first-generation students, don’t have the luxury of waiting for higher education to sort out its own org chart. They came to us with a career goal. The least we can do is make sure our institution has one coherent answer to the question of who’s going to help them reach it.