The Career Readiness Report and NACE Ready

Verified 2026-08-02 from nace.suitable.co and suitable.co. If anything here has gone out of date, we would rather be told than be wrong: [email protected].

Start with what they have that we do not

NACE Ready is the official tool. It is built under an exclusive partnership between NACE and Suitable, and NACE describes it as its competency assessment tool. We implement the same eight competencies because NACE publishes them, and that is the entire relationship: no endorsement, no partnership, no affiliation.

They have national benchmark data. Their page offers institutions the ability to "[c]ompare your data against national benchmarks". We do not have that. Our platform is built for peer benchmarking (minimum group sizes, institution-level opt out) and there is no comparison set yet, because the platform is new. Anyone telling you a new product has national norms is describing an intention.

They are established. Suitable has been implementing this at institutions since the partnership was announced; we opened signups this summer and carry a beta label until a careers office has run a full term through the platform.

If either of the first two is a requirement in your evaluation, the honest answer is that NACE Ready meets it and we do not. That is worth two minutes of your time now rather than two months into a procurement.

Where the two are genuinely similar

Both measure the eight NACE Career Readiness Competencies. Both ask the student to rate themselves and then ask somebody who watched the work. Their page describes observer feedback "typically from internship supervisors, faculty, or mentors" that compares the self-rating "with real-world, observed behaviors"; that is the same method we use, because it is the method the underlying research supports. Both produce per-student reports and institution-level data.

If you have read that self-assessment alone is weak evidence and concluded you need observer ratings, both of these tools agree with you.

Where we differ

Cost. Ours is free: no per-student price, no rater price, no implementation fee, no contract, every feature, unlimited students. Suitable does not publish pricing on its site; what it costs you is a conversation with them. We are not going to characterise a price we have not seen, and you should ask them directly.

Rating scale. Their page describes four levels of proficiency. We use a five-point frequency scale with an explicit "not observed" option, because asking a supervisor how often a behaviour occurred gets more consistent answers than asking them to grade proficiency, and because a rater who never saw a competency should be able to say so instead of picking the middle. Our rubric is published in full, including that reasoning, whether or not you ever use our platform.

What a rater has to do. Ours rate through a single-use link with no account, no password and no portal, because response rate is the whole dependency in observer-based assessment.

Scope. NACE Ready sits inside Suitable's engagement platform, so if you also want co-curricular records, guided pathways and organisation management, that is one system rather than two. We do only the measurement, and we have no job board, no employer CRM and no appointment scheduling. If the engagement platform is what you are buying, we are not an alternative to it.

Getting in. Ours is self-signup: create an institution and run a window this afternoon, no demo call. Their page offers a demo request.

Access to the instrument. Our rubric, item design and scoring approach are public, and the trust documents (HECVAT, VPAT, DPA) are published rather than sent after a sales conversation.

How to decide without taking our word for it

1. Ask both for the actual rater experience. Have somebody who is not in your office try to

complete a rating from a phone in under five minutes.

1. Ask what happens to your data if you leave, and get the export format in writing.
2. Ask what the instrument is, whether it changes under you, and what happens to

term-over-term comparison when it does.

1. If national benchmarks matter to your reporting, ask what the comparison set actually is:

how many institutions, what kinds, and how recent.

1. Run a single cohort through whichever you shortlist. One term of real data settles

arguments that a demo cannot.

Ours costs nothing to try, which is the only argument on this page we would push: you can create your institution and have real results this term without a purchase order, and still buy something else afterwards.