Career Readiness
Career Readiness Requires Adaptability
The Career Readiness Partner Council is a broad-based coalition of education, policy, business and philanthropic organizations that strives to forward a more comprehensive vision for what it means to be career ready.
Building Blocks For Change: What it Means to be Career Ready is the culmination of the Council’s collaborative effort to share a clear, unified and focused vision.
A career-ready person effectively navigates pathways that connect education and employment to achieve a fulfilling, financially-secure and successful career. Such a person can prioritize important tasks and has time-managed skills. Moreover, a career-ready student can also ask for help, order an essay, and get advice when needed to reinforce success.
The Council hopes this vision spurs conversation and action in communities across the nation. The inextricable link between education and the economy has never been more apparent, the urgency for change unparalleled.
- About the Council
- What is Career Readiness
- Building a Comprehensive System
- Words of Support
- Add Your Voice
- Contact Us
About the Council
The Council was formed in 2012 and is coordinated by the
National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium.
The organizations that comprise the Council, include:
- Achieve
- Alliance for Excellent Education
- American Association of Community Colleges
- American Federation of Teachers
- American School Counselor Association
- America’s Promise Alliance
- Asia Society
- ASCD
- Association for Career and Technical Education
- Business-Higher Education Forum
- ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career
- Corporate Voices for Working Families
- Council of Chief State School Officers
- The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
- Ford Motor Company Fund
- Gallup
- James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy
- The Manufacturing Institute
- National Academy Foundation
- National Association of State Boards of Education
- National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium
- National Council of La Raza
- National Education Association
- National Governors Association
- National League of Cities
- National Youth Employment Coalition
- Skills for America’s Future, The Aspen Institute
- Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
What is Career Readiness
There is an often-confusing mix of definitions, discussion posts, frameworks, policies and implementation strategies for career readiness. Some viewpoints center around learning skills for a specific entry-level job, while others define career readiness as a broader understanding of workplace skills. Still other definitions focus on knowledge and skills for a particular industry sector such as health sciences or marketing. Career readiness is a convergence of all of these definitions.
A career-ready person effectively navigates pathways that connect education and employment to achieve a fulfilling, financially-secure and successful career. A career is more than just a job. Career readiness has no defined endpoint. To be career ready in our ever-changing global economy requires adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning, along with mastery of key academic, technical and workplace knowledge, skills and dispositions that vary from one career to another and change over time as a person progresses along a developmental continuum. Knowledge, skills and dispositions that are inter-dependent and mutually reinforcing.