In our Traci's Take series, Our resident student success guru, Traci Steehler, gives her unfiltered and practical take on the latest in student engagement and success. This spring, she's breaking down NASPA's 2025 Top Issues in Student Affairs Follow-Up Brief: Student Success. Point by point, she'll pull from decades of experience to share how you can apply NASPA's findings to serve your institution.
“Amidst a changing job market and eroding public trust around the promise of higher education, ensuring internal alignment and focusing on preparation for the workforce are core priorities in efforts to advance student success. Almost two thirds of VPSAs ranked increasing institution-wide collaboration to deliver coordinated student success support as a very important issue to their institution in 2025. Institution-wide collaboration is closely linked to efforts to advance career advising and provide students with an affirming institutional experience. Tied for second most frequently ranked as very important were building relationships with employers and alumni to create pipelines for mentoring, internships, and jobs, as well as providing students with education and supports to ensure they have an affirming institutional experience.” (NASPA)
First strategy for Student Affairs professionals to consider (NASPA): “Partner with career services to design and deliver ongoing briefings for student affairs staff on emerging job market/industry data and employer needs.”
Traci’s thoughts:
Collaboration often feels like a buzzword, a good intention that rarely survives the move from strategic plan to Monday staff meeting. The NASPA brief highlights a critical starting point for breaking this cycle: Strategy 1, which calls for Student Affairs to partner with Career Services to design and deliver ongoing briefings for student affairs staff on emerging job market data and employer needs.
To understand this, let’s look at why many ROI-driving initiatives or skill-building collaborations struggle. Most don’t fail because of a lack of effort or commitment. Instead, the issue is that different departments are often speaking different languages.
Without a shared framework to translate industry data into student development, these briefings can feel disconnected from the daily work of student engagement and support.
If we want to help Strategy 1 move beyond a calendar invite, institutions need a translator.
Shared frameworks, like the NACE Career Readiness Competencies help provide the common language needed for departments to articulate student development with the same terms. When Career Services shares that employers are looking for specific digital literacy or critical thinking skills, Student Affairs staff need to know exactly how those needs map to the programs they already run. Tools like NACE Ready — with NACE’s Career Readiness Competencies — provide a common structure that allows multiple departments to work toward the same goals while describing them in the same terms.
When a course, leadership program, or major initiative aligns with the NACE competency framework, skill development becomes clearer — not just internally, but externally as well. More importantly, those skills can be tracked, measured, and communicated in ways that demonstrate real value to employers. This is critical, since NASPA reported that while 60% of graduates say career success was their motivation for going to college, only 39% actually felt their institution invested in their career.
When supported by a single, mobile-first platform, these competencies help translate campus experiences into tangible skill development. Leadership roles, co-curricular involvement, internships, and academic projects all become part of a unified story about student growth. Instead of operating in different silos, departments contribute to a shared narrative about how students are developing the competencies needed for the workforce.
By aligning around a shared competency framework, a briefing on industry trends isn’t just a meeting, it’s a strategic tool that allows staff to:
Create affirming experiences by ensuring that all students, especially those from minoritized backgrounds who are more likely to lack professional networks, receive the same career-minded, data-informed support.
This shared language also matters beyond campus. Employers rarely see the full picture of a student’s college experience. Instead, they rely on GPA, resumes, interviews, and brief social interactions to understand what a student can actually do. When institutions align around widely recognized competencies, it becomes easier to translate those experiences into language employers immediately understand since they speak in skills and competencies everyday
Research consistently shows that soft skills — such as NACE's studied eight core competencies — are among the most important attributes hiring managers seek. Students who can clearly demonstrate growth in these areas gain a meaningful advantage over peers who may have had similar experiences but struggle to articulate the skills they developed along the way.
For students, the result is more than just a stronger resume. It’s a clearer understanding of how their experiences connect to their future careers and a more compelling way to communicate that story to employers. In an increasingly competitive job market, that clarity can make all the difference.
Join us for the next break down — we’ll share practical applications for NASPA’s next insight: mapping the student journey to streamline processes.