Career Readiness Is More Than Becoming More Competent

A graduate does not arrive at work on Monday morning and encounter a situation labeled Communication Competency. They encounter an unclear request from a supervisor. A disagreement with a colleague. An unfamiliar workplace norm. A difficult conversation shaped by trust, ambiguity, competing expectations, power, and consequences.

The situation does not tell the graduate which competency to use. They have to determine that for themselves.

Higher education has spent decades defining the competencies students need to succeed after graduation. That work has been valuable. Competency frameworks have helped institutions, educators, employers, and learners establish a shared language for the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and dispositions that matter in professional life. Frameworks such as NACE’s Career Readiness Competencies have brought important clarity to areas including Communication, Critical Thinking, Teamwork, Leadership, Professionalism, and Career & Self-Development (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], n.d.).

In doing so, they have helped answer an important educational question:

What should learners become more competent at?

It is an important question, but it is not the only one.

Career readiness ultimately reveals itself in situations rather than frameworks. Graduates enter workplaces where expectations are incomplete, relationships are complicated, priorities compete, and circumstances change unexpectedly. Success depends not only on what they have developed, but on what they can recognize, bring together, and use when the situation in front of them does not announce which competency applies.

That suggests a second question deserves equal attention:

Are we also helping learners become more capable?

What Were NACE Students Really Asking For?

A recent NACE article reporting early findings from a three-year qualitative study on how students define and experience communication readiness offers a revealing example (McCullough & Miller, 2025). Rather than describing communication primarily as a set of isolated skills, students spoke about conflict, power dynamics, unclear expectations, difficult relationships, trust, fitting into workplace cultures, unwritten professional norms, and the uncertainty they expected to encounter after graduation.

What they wanted in response is equally revealing.

Students asked for more realistic scenarios. They wanted greater exposure to workplace realities, opportunities to practice, meaningful feedback, structured reflection, supportive role models, and chances to learn from both successes and mistakes (McCullough & Miller, 2025).

Viewed through a traditional competency lens, these requests might be interpreted as calls for additional opportunities to strengthen Communication competency.

Viewed through a capability lens, however, they suggest something more.

The students were not simply asking to become better communicators. They were describing a need to become more capable of bringing what they had already developed into situations that were unfamiliar, uncertain, and difficult to navigate.

That is a different developmental challenge.

A learner may know how to listen actively, communicate clearly, ask thoughtful questions, and adapt a message to different audiences—and still feel uncertain when several of those abilities must be combined with judgment, critical thinking, resilience, contextual understanding, and awareness of organizational dynamics in a situation they have never encountered before.

The developmental question is no longer simply whether the learner possesses or can demonstrate a competency.

It becomes whether the learner can recognize what the situation requires and bring what they have developed into effective action.

Becoming More Competent and Becoming More Capable Are Related—but Different

Competency frameworks perform an essential role in career readiness. They define important domains of effective performance. They help institutions identify priorities, establish shared language, organize learning, and assess evidence of development.

Capability has an equally important history within higher education and professional learning, although it asks a different question. Stephenson (1992) described capability as the integration of knowledge, skills, personal qualities, and understanding used appropriately and effectively in both familiar and unfamiliar circumstances. Fraser and Greenhalgh (2001) later extended this perspective, emphasizing the capacity to adapt to change, generate new knowledge, and continue improving performance as situations evolve.

This does not make competency and capability opposing concepts. They overlap substantially. Competencies contribute to what a person can bring to a situation. A capability perspective, however, directs particular attention toward what happens when people must integrate, adapt, and apply what they have developed as circumstances become unfamiliar, changing, complex, or unpredictable.

That shift moves us from asking what learners possess to asking what learners can actually do with what they possess.

What can they recognize when circumstances change? Can they identify which knowledge, skills, prior experiences, strategies, and personal resources are relevant? Can they bring those elements together, adapt them to unfamiliar conditions, and respond effectively when there is no rubric, no instructor, and no predefined answer?

Perhaps most importantly, can they learn from what happens so they are better prepared for the next unfamiliar situation?

Competencies contribute to capability.

Capability becomes visible in what learners can bring together and put into action when situations require more than the application of a single competency.

That distinction has a direct implication for career-readiness development. If learners are expected to integrate, adapt, and apply what they have developed in unfamiliar situations, then defining competencies is not enough. Nor is simply giving students more experiences.

Capability Requires More Than More Experiences

A student can complete an internship, contribute to a major project, and navigate difficult moments—and still leave without fully understanding what they drew upon, what they developed, or what they could use again.

That is why simply giving students more experiences is not enough. Internships, simulations, projects, mentoring, work-based learning, and realistic scenarios can all contribute to capability development. But experience alone does not guarantee that learners will recognize what happened, connect it with prior learning, or make it available for future use.

A learner can complete an internship without fully recognizing what they learned from it. They can navigate a challenging group project without identifying the judgment, communication, persistence, or adjustment the situation required. They can succeed without understanding what produced the success, or struggle without examining what they might do differently next time.

The experience happened. That does not mean its learning has become available for future use.

This is the broader challenge explored in Beyond Experiential Learning: Why Higher Education Needs a Metacognitive Model of Learning Practice: experiences become developmentally valuable when learners have deliberate ways to interpret them, connect them with what they already know, and prepare to use what they have learned again.

That is where making learning practices visible becomes essential.

Learners need ways to notice what matters, question their assumptions, examine their actions, make connections, evaluate outcomes, recognize developing capabilities, and determine what an experience has made possible. They need to articulate what they drew upon, what changed, and what they can now carry forward. They also need purpose-built tools that help them engage in those practices deliberately rather than relying on reflection to happen informally or by chance.

These practices are easy to overlook because much of the work they perform is internal. Yet they shape whether students merely participate in experiences or learn how to use those experiences as resources for future action.

As learners engage in these practices across different situations, they begin to build more than a collection of experiences. They develop a richer repertoire of knowledge, strategies, prior actions, interpretations, and capabilities from which they can draw.

They also become better able to recognize when a new situation resembles something they have encountered before, when an earlier approach needs to be adapted, and when different elements of their learning must be brought together in a new way.

This is how experiences begin to accumulate as capability rather than simply accumulate as experiences.

Career Readiness Needs Both

Students need both.

They need opportunities to develop the competencies that matter in professional life. They also need to become capable of recognizing what a situation requires, bringing together what they have developed, and adapting it when familiar approaches no longer fit.

Competency frameworks remain valuable because they identify important areas of development and provide a shared language through which learning can be supported and assessed. Capability adds another layer by directing attention to what learners can actually bring into action when circumstances are unfamiliar, ambiguous, and consequential.

The capability perspective changes what institutions must do with that clarity. Colleges need to help students bring those areas of development together, adapt them to changing circumstances, and learn from their use. That requires more than opportunities to encounter realistic experiences. It requires deliberate support for interpreting those experiences, recognizing what learners drew upon, understanding what they developed, connecting learning across settings, and preparing to use it again under different conditions.

This changes the role of reflection in career-readiness development. Reflection cannot remain an activity added after the experience is over, primarily to document participation or describe what happened. It must become part of how learners examine action, test their interpretations, recognize capability, and make learning available for future use.

Structured learning practices and purpose-built tools make that possible. They help students turn experience into usable learning, recognize capability while it is developing, and build a repertoire they can draw upon when the next situation does not arrive with a rubric or a predefined answer.

At B Optimal, this is where our work begins. Competency frameworks identify important areas of development. Our work focuses on helping learners build capability by making the learning practices behind effective action visible, actionable, and transferable.

Career readiness requires both. Learners need opportunities to develop important competencies, but they also need deliberate practice in recognizing what situations require, bringing together what they have developed, adapting it to new conditions, and learning from what happens next.

A competency framework can help describe what a graduate has developed.

Capability becomes visible when the graduate encounters a situation that does not tell them what to do—and can still determine what it requires, bring forward what they have learned, and act.

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References

Fraser, S. W., & Greenhalgh, T. (2001). Coping with complexity: Educating for capability. BMJ, 323(7316), 799–803. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7316.799

McCullough, K., & Miller, L. N. (2025, July 10). Their words, their worries: A grounded look at career readiness from the student perspective. National Association of Colleges and Employers. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/their-words-their-worries-a-grounded-look-at-career-readiness-from-the-student-perspective

National Association of Colleges and Employers. (n.d.). What is career readiness? https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined

Stephenson, J. (1992). Capability and quality in higher education. In J. Stephenson & S. Weil (Eds.), Quality in learning: A capability approach in higher education (pp. 1–9). Kogan Page.

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About B Optimal Insights

B Optimal’s Insights explore the assumptions that shape learning in higher education—and the learning practices that often remain hidden beneath them. Rather than asking only what students should experience, these articles ask what students must actually learn to do if those experiences are to become lasting capability.