The United States has built one of the largest career support ecosystems in the world: federal programs, state and local workforce boards, career services at colleges and universities, nonprofits, philanthropic initiatives. More than 40 workforce programs run across 14 agencies, and states collectively outspend the federal investment. Every one of these institutions claims career support as part of its mission.
But the infrastructure we have built is oriented toward institutions, not the individual. It is designed to place people, credential people, and report on people. It is not designed to help them navigate for themselves.
All programs in this ecosystem track at least some outcomes, including credential attainment, placement rates, employment status, and early wages. Each captures a moment. None measure whether someone’s economic trajectory actually improved, whether the skills they built transferred to the next role, or whether the career they entered remained viable years later.
The way we measure career success reinforces this orientation. Standards used in higher education, such as NACE Career Readiness, and in workforce programs describe what employers want to see at the point of hire. They are checklists shaped by employer input and optimized for employer needs. The checklist orientation misses much of what the individual needs: how to read a labor market on their own behalf, how to evaluate which skills transfer and which need to be built, how to develop and maintain professional relationships. These are teachable capabilities, yet no standards include them.
The cost of optimizing for the employer falls on the individual, and it compounds. When career support is organized around getting the next job, people learn to think in episodes rather than systems. Each choice shapes the choices that follow, but nothing in the infrastructure helps anyone see that. One of the least fulfilled promises of career education is helping people recognize that they have a career, not a series of disconnected job searches.
The foundation of career advising in the U.S. is a counseling model. Many career professionals already work well beyond it in practice, but the accreditation standards and institutional expectations they operate within treat career difficulty as something to be resolved through self-knowledge and emotional processing. Decades of research in decision science tell us something different. Career decisions are among the hardest cognitive challenges people face: feedback is delayed, identity is at stake, and information is asymmetric. These conditions require structured support, external information, and purpose-built tools. When we frame a structural navigation challenge as a personal deficit, we treat people who need support and systems as problems to fix.
In every model we have, the person is the object being acted upon. Placed. Readied. Upskilled. Matched. We have been treating students and workers as the payload when they are actually the pilot.
Anyone immersed in skills-based hiring understands how fast roles are changing. Consider someone placed as a health information technician, one of the most funded early-career pathways in the country. Within two years, the job may move from coding records to auditing AI and enforcing data rules, leaving workers’ training behind. The entire career infrastructure of programs, advising, and funding is organized around leading people to titles. As titles no longer reliably describe the skills needed, the organizing principle of the system is unstable.
Career navigation is a teachable domain, and recognizing that changes what we build. The work starts with identifying competencies for career navigation that can be taught, measured, and funded with the same rigor we apply to other workforce capabilities.
Professional associations like NACE on the higher ed side and federal and state agencies on the workforce side set the standards career programs are built to meet. They can update those standards to include navigation competencies rather than the readiness checklists that currently anchor them. Institutions design and deliver career support through colleges, workforce boards, and nonprofits. They can move beyond the counseling-and-placement model toward structured competency-building, with practitioners equipped and funded to work at the level the problem actually demands. Funders and policymakers determine which outcomes get measured and which programs get scaled. They can require longitudinal evidence of career trajectory rather than placement rates that capture only the moment of hire.
Technology has a role, too, but only if it is built for the right user. Most career tools today are built for institutions: students and workers may interact with them inside a program, but nothing goes with them when they leave. Builders can design technology for the individual, giving people persistent systems to manage their own career intelligence across roles, transitions, and decades. The same systems can extend the reach of underfunded practitioners, giving both them and the people they serve tools that match the actual complexity of the problems they face.
We know what works for helping adults build complex capabilities. Research points to structured practice, feedback loops, iteration, and demonstrated mastery over time. We have championed competency-based education across virtually every domain of workforce preparation. But in career development, we have ignored all of it. Instead of skill-building, we offer assessments, resume reviews, LinkedIn optimization, and career fairs. Research suggests that career program impacts are small and short-term, with almost no longitudinal evidence of impact on career outcomes. We have applied more rigor to the study of assessment instruments than to whether career interventions actually improve people’s careers.
Some programs are already moving in this direction, but they remain exceptions within a system not built around the individual. The economic mobility of students and workers depends on infrastructure that starts with them: their agency, their capability, their ability to navigate a labor market that will not stop changing. That infrastructure does not yet exist. Building it is a choice the institutions, funders, standards-setters, and builders of this system can make.
Susan Morrow is CEO of Career Strong. She previously served as general manager for education at Salesforce, vice chancellor at National University System, and chief product officer of Reading Rainbow.