Career Readiness Software for Higher Education (Free)

Career readiness software is the system a college uses to measure whether its students are becoming employable, usually against the eight NACE Career Readiness Competencies, and to prove it to accreditors, boards and state funders. A complete platform imports a student roster, runs assessment windows against real experiences, collects ratings from the employers and faculty who supervised the work, and reports competency development by cohort. The Career Readiness Report does all of that and is free for every institution.

What career readiness software is for

A careers office is asked three questions it usually cannot answer with data. Are our students becoming employable. Which competencies are weakest, and in which programs. Did the thing we changed last year work. Career readiness software exists to answer those three, repeatedly, in a form an accreditor or a provost will accept.

That is a narrower job than a careers office platform. Job boards, appointment scheduling, event management and employer relationship tools all matter, and none of them measure whether a student can communicate, collaborate or think critically. Measurement is a separate capability, and it is the one that gets cut when budgets are set per student.

The eight capabilities that matter

Evaluate any platform in this category against these, because they are the places implementations fail rather than the places demos fail.

A shared framework, not a bespoke rubric. If the instrument is unique to

the vendor, results cannot be compared with anything, including your own results after the vendor changes it. The eight NACE competencies are the common language employers, career services and accreditors already use.

Roster import. Students should not have to be recruited into the

assessment one by one. A CSV of the cohort, matched on your own student identifier so a re-import corrects records rather than duplicating them.

Assessment windows tied to real experiences. A competency rating means

very little without the internship, co-op, job, course or campus role it is a rating of.

Observer ratings from outside the institution. The employer or faculty

supervisor who watched the work is the direct evidence. If they are required to create an account, most of them will not: participation is the whole dependency, so rating has to be a single-use link and nothing more.

The self-versus-observer gap, computed for you. Two numbers side by side

is the finding. A platform that reports only self-assessment is measuring confidence.

Cohort analytics with response rates. Reviewers ask what proportion of

the cohort responded before they read any result, and they are right to.

Exports built for a review, not a dashboard screenshot. Competency

results by cohort, major and term, mapped to your program learning outcomes.

Procurement documentation on the public record. A HECVAT response, a

VPAT, a data processing agreement with a FERPA addendum. If these arrive only after a sales call, the evaluation takes a semester longer.

What to ask about cost

Per-student pricing is the norm in this category, and it has a specific effect: the institutions with the largest enrolments and the smallest budgets, which are frequently the ones serving students who most need documented evidence of employability, pay the most and buy the least. Ask what happens to the price when enrolment grows, whether raters are billed, whether historical data remains accessible after a contract ends, and what the implementation fee is.

Our answer to all four is that the platform is free: no per-student cost, no rater cost, no implementation fee, and your data exportable at any time.

Where the Career Readiness Report fits

It does the measurement job on this page and does not pretend to be a careers suite. It has the NACE instrument, roster import, assessment windows, 360 rater feedback by single-use link, per-student reports, cohort analytics, accreditation exports, institution branding on your own subdomain and optional campus SSO. It does not have a job board, an employer CRM or appointment scheduling, and if those are what you are shopping for, this is not the tool.

It is open now, in beta, and you can see a real report or create an institution without talking to anybody. If you are shortlisting, the tools in this category are compared here, including the ones that do things we do not. If you would rather build your own instrument, our NACE competency rating rubric is published in full, free to copy, and needs no account.