Free, and already proven at scale

Why this page exists

If a platform costs nothing, has anyone actually used it? It is a fair question and it deserves a direct answer rather than a testimonial.

What follows is the operating record of the assessment instrument now used in the Career Readiness Report: what was measured, at what kind of institution, over how long, and what the record does not prove. Every figure comes from production assessment records and was counted directly. None are projections, and none are rounded up.

The record in four numbers

The window runs from December 2023 to December 2025, two full academic years. Ten of the twenty institutions carried live student cohorts; the rest evaluated the tool without enrolling one.

The anchor deployment

A public R1 university in the Southeast ran the assessment continuously from December 2023 through September 2025, recording responses in 21 of those 22 months. It is the deployment that proved the instrument holds up at volume: 371,064 responses from a single institution, from 8,711 students, roughly 43 completed competency items each.

Scale is the part that usually breaks a career readiness tool. Cohorts arrive in bursts at term boundaries, supervisors respond on their own schedule weeks later, and reporting has to stay coherent while both are still moving. This deployment ran through two full academic years of that cycle without the assessment being redesigned underneath the data, which is what makes the resulting record longitudinal rather than a series of disconnected snapshots.

Every size of institution

The instrument was not only exercised at one large university. It ran at private liberal arts colleges of a few hundred students, at regional publics, at a flagship business school and at a small Catholic college.

Counts are of distinct students with at least one recorded response, and of individual competency responses. A further 13,044 responses predate per-institution attribution and are included in the totals above but not in this table. Responses from internal demonstration and test accounts are excluded from both.

Institutions are described by profile rather than named. They were customers of an earlier deployment rather than current users, and naming a university in marketing is something to do with its written permission or not at all.

The instrument

128 assessment items mapped to the eight NACE Career Readiness Competencies:

• Career and Self-Development
• Communication
• Critical Thinking
• Equity and Inclusion
• Leadership
• Professionalism
• Teamwork
• Technology

The framework did not change across the two years, which is the reason the record above can be read longitudinally at all. Alongside the assessments sit 144 cohorts, 4,632 cohort enrolments and 14,173 logged student experiences.

What carried forward, and what did not

The Career Readiness Report was written from scratch as a multi-tenant application. It shares no code with the earlier system. What carried over was everything validated by use; what was rebuilt was everything the earlier architecture made hard.

The competency framework. The same eight NACE competencies and the item bank built against them, unchanged.

Supervisor validation. Self-assessment rated against a supervisor's independent view of the same student, through a single-use link that needs no account. 1,298 supervisors used it.

Cohort structure. 144 cohorts and 4,632 enrolments established how terms, groups and reporting periods need to relate to each other.

Accreditation evidence. The reporting shape that assessment offices actually asked for, now a first-class export rather than a workaround.

What this record does not prove

A claim a reviewer can catch out is worth less than no claim. Three limits, stated before anyone has to ask.

It is not a national benchmark. Cross-institution comparison is built into the current platform, with minimum group sizes and institution-level opt out, but no benchmark cohort exists yet. Until one does we will not report a national percentile, and you should not accept one from any vendor who cannot show you the denominator underneath it.

It is concentrated. A single institution accounts for 80% of all responses. The instrument is proven at volume in one place and proven to work in ten, which is a different and more modest claim than twenty institutions at scale.

It is not an outcomes study. These are competency assessments, not employment or salary outcomes. Nothing here establishes that a higher competency score produces a better job, and we make no such claim.

Frequently asked

Is this the same software those institutions used?

No, and the distinction matters. The current application is a fresh multi-tenant build. What those institutions validated was the instrument: the item bank, the five-point frequency scale, the supervisor rating flow and the cohort model. All four carried forward. The code underneath them did not.

Why is a platform with this record free?

Career readiness tools are priced per student, which means the institutions serving the students who most need the evidence are the least able to buy them. Free is the structural choice this product is built around, not an introductory rate. There is no paid tier planned and no per-student cost.

Can we see the underlying data?

Not the records themselves. Those are student education records protected under FERPA, and everything on this page is aggregate and de-identified. What you can see is the product: there is a no-signup demo institution, and any college or university can create a real institution and run an assessment window today.