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. 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.
“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.” (NASPA)
Next strategy for Student Affairs professionals to consider: "Provide faculty and student affairs staff with guidance on ways to integrate career conversations into advising, orientation, and co-curricular programming."(NASPA)
Traci’s thoughts:
When many people hear the phrase "career readiness,” they immediately think of career fairs, resume workshops, and job interviews.
This is one way to look at it, but this perspective doesn’t align with how students experience learning over time. Career readiness absolutely includes these big moments, but it is meaningfully anchored by little, everyday learning and leadership opportunities students experience every day.
The urgency to bridge this gap is real. Recent data highlighted in the NASPA brief reveals that while 60% of graduates cited career success as their motivation for getting a degree, only 39% actually felt that their institution invested in their career. This disconnect is even greater for first-generation students, who report feeling significantly less prepared for their careers compared to non-first generation peers.
Ultimately, students experience career development through the moments that shape them long before they ever sit down to write a resume.
This may look like leading a student organization meeting, navigating conflict with a teammate, or organizing an event. Managing a budget, volunteering, communicating and collaborating — these are all transformative career readiness moments.
The challenge is that students often don't recognize (and therefore struggle to articulate) these moments as career development while they're happening.
That's where Student Affairs has an opportunity to lead.
One thing Student Affairs professionals have always done exceptionally well is help students make meaning of their experiences. We know that learning doesn't only happen in the classroom. Some of the most impactful growth occurs through co-curricular involvement, leadership opportunities, campus employment, service experiences, and everyday interactions across campus.
The question is: how do we help students connect those experiences to their future careers?
The answer isn't simply adding more career programming. It's integrating career conversations into the experiences students are already having.
NASPA's recommendation highlights something many institutions are beginning to recognize: career readiness shouldn't be confined to the career center. It should be woven throughout the student experience.That means every facet of the university working together to help students understand the value of engagement from day one.
Orientation leaders, RAs, advisors, professors and more are all vital pieces of this mission. It is crucial for campus employees to understand that small interactions, such as an encouraging conversation or a well-timed resource, can have a lasting impact.
It means advisors asking students not only what classes they're taking, but what skills they're developing. It means faculty connecting coursework to professional competencies. And it means Student Affairs staff helping students recognize the learning that's taking place through co-curricular involvement.
The key is moving beyond participation tracking and toward reflection.
Guided Pathways is modeled off this same theory. The activity log presents gamified activities to students that have specific competencies attached to them. Then, as students complete more activities, they build an evidence-based log that demonstrates their skills, engagement, and accomplishments with the Co-Curricular Transcript. The co-curricular transcript not only tracks experiences for students, but shows them exactly how these experiences are valuable to their future career path and teaches them how to articulate that value for themselves.
The real growth happens during the "aha!” moments — the moments when it all comes together for students, built on a foundation of small moments of success.
For example, imagine a student completes a training on how to submit a budget request for their student organization. At first glance, it might seem like a simple administrative task.
But what if, immediately afterward, they're prompted to reflect on the experience?
What skills did you develop?
How did you solve problems?
How did you communicate with others?
What challenges did you navigate?
Suddenly, that one-time training becomes something much bigger to the student. They begin recognizing that they've practiced budgeting, financial management, communication, organization, and leadership. Skills employers consistently search for and value.
These moments of reflection help students connect the dots in real time. Because the reality is that many students struggle to identify and articulate their skills when they need them most.
Three years later, when they're sitting in front of a blank resume or preparing for a job interview, they often find themselves asking: "What have I actually done?"
By then, many of those experiences have faded into the background.
Helping students reflect as they go allows them to capture their growth while it's still fresh. They begin building a vocabulary around their experiences and developing confidence in their abilities long before graduation.
This is where technology can play an important supporting role.
The goal isn't simply to create a better resume. The goal is to create opportunities for reflection, competency development, and meaning-making throughout the student journey. This is where Suitable is different. All of these meaning-making elements are intuitively gamified into a place students already feel most comfortable — on their phones.
When institutions intentionally integrate career conversations across advising, orientation, and co-curricular programming, career readiness stops being a separate initiative. It becomes part of the student experience itself.
We can help students to get more out of their experiences. It just takes intentional scaffolding. At the end of the day, career readiness isn't just about helping students get jobs after graduation. It's about helping them understand the value of the experiences they're having today.
When students can recognize their growth as it happens, they're better prepared to tell their story, articulate their strengths, and confidently take the next step toward their future.
Join us for the next breakdown as we explore NASPA’s next point — leveraging alumni and employer networks to clarify value propositions to students.