"Can you share examples of institutions with truly high-performing career ecosystems?"
I looked at my consulting partner and co-presenter, Judy Anderson.
Judy looked at me.
Then she said: "I think we're just at the beginning."
And honestly, Reader, I agree.
We've worked with institutions across the country. We've seen outstanding career centers, innovative internship programs, strong employer partnerships, impressive alumni engagement efforts.
But when it comes to fully developed, institution-wide career ecosystems?
The kind where career preparation is intentionally woven throughout the student experience, supported across divisions, reinforced by faculty, embraced by leadership, and measured as an institutional priority?
We don't see many. At least not yet.
That may sound surprising.
After all, higher education has been talking about career outcomes for years.
So why aren't there more examples?
The more I thought about the question, the more I realized something. I'm not sure we've even reached agreement on what a high-performing career ecosystem actually is.
When we ask institutional leaders about career ecosystems, the answers are often surprisingly vague. They describe programs, initiatives, partnerships, and sometimes individual offices. Occasionally, it sounds like a larger collection of what they're already doing. (Even when those efforts aren't producing the results they want.)
What they rarely describe is an intentionally designed system that helps students build career momentum from enrollment through graduation—a system with clear expectations, clear ownership, and clear measures of success.
And if we can't clearly define what a high-performing career ecosystem is, it's not surprising that we struggle to build one.
Most institutions are working on pieces of the puzzle, and some are doing remarkable work.
But fully developed career ecosystems remain surprisingly rare.
Why? Because building an ecosystem requires institutions to answer a handful of questions that many have never seriously confronted.
The four questions most institutions haven't answered
First, institutions have to agree on the problem
One of the most common patterns I see is institutions jumping immediately to solutions.
They want more internships. More employer engagement. More faculty involvement. More experiential learning. More technology. More career programming.
But when you start asking why, the answers often vary dramatically.
Some leaders are worried about enrollment. Others are worried about retention. Others are concerned about outcomes, workforce alignment, state accountability, rankings, or employer perception.
These concerns are all valid and important. But the challenge is that they lead to different priorities and different strategies.
An institution that is trying to improve internship participation may need a very different solution than one trying to improve graduate outcomes. An institution focused on enrollment pressures may approach career preparation differently than one responding to state policy changes.
Yet many campuses pursue similar interventions without first developing a shared understanding of the challenge they are trying to solve.
That's a problem.
Because different challenges require different solutions, and high-performing ecosystems begin with clarity about both.
Then they have to decide what students should actually experience
This is where the conversation often shifts from aspiration to reality.
Most institutions can describe opportunities available to students. They can point to internships, employer events, mentoring programs, career courses, alumni networks, and experiential learning opportunities.
What is often less clear is what every student should experience before graduation.
Should every student engage with employers?
Should every student participate in experiential learning?
Should every student learn how to articulate their skills?
Should every student build professional relationships beyond campus?
These questions seem simple until you start discussing them across departments, divisions, and academic programs.
Because the moment an institution moves from offering opportunities to establishing expectations, new questions emerge about capacity, responsibility, resources, and accountability.
That's often where the real work begins.
At some point, someone has to make decisions
Many institutions operate under the assumption that career preparation is everyone's responsibility.
Conceptually, I agree. Operationally, it can create problems.
When responsibility is widely shared, authority is often unclear. Career services cannot redesign curricula. Academic affairs cannot coordinate every employer relationship. Student affairs cannot establish institution-wide expectations on its own. Faculty influence much of the student experience but may not view career preparation as part of their role.
As a result, important decisions are frequently deferred, fragmented, or negotiated one department at a time.
The institutions making the greatest progress have not necessarily solved every challenge. But they have created mechanisms for making decisions, setting priorities, and moving work forward across organizational boundaries.
That sounds less exciting than launching a new initiative.
It is also considerably more effective.
Finally, institutions have to decide what they are willing to change
This may be the most difficult conversation of all.
Most campuses want stronger career outcomes. Most want more engaged employers. Most want students to graduate with greater confidence, clearer direction, and stronger professional networks.
The question is whether those goals are important enough to drive institutional change.
Ecosystems rarely emerge from adding one more program. They emerge when institutions change how they operate.
That may involve redefining roles. Reallocating resources. Revisiting long-standing assumptions. Establishing new expectations. Creating new partnerships. Letting go of efforts that no longer serve the broader strategy.
These decisions are not always comfortable. But they are often the difference between having a collection of career-related activities and building an ecosystem that consistently produces results.
A framework
Over the past few years, these conversations have become a recurring theme in my consulting work.
They rarely fit neatly within a single office, committee, or initiative because they are fundamentally institutional design questions.
That's one of the reasons we've been developing The Career Design Blueprint™—a framework designed to help institutions examine the underlying conditions that shape career preparation at scale.
We focus on the organizational structures, decision-making processes, partnerships, and systems that determine whether those efforts can succeed.
I'll share more about the Blueprint and the thinking behind it in Thursday's email.
For now, I'd encourage you to consider which of these conversations is most relevant on your campus.
Because the answer may tell you more about the state of your career ecosystem than any benchmark report.
What strikes me most about this work is that institutions often assume they are discussing career ecosystems when they are actually discussing career activities.
The conversation quickly becomes a discussion about internships, employer engagement, career readiness competencies, alumni mentoring, first-destination outcomes, or career center staffing. All of those things matter. But they are components of a system, not the system itself.
Career ecosystems are similar.
The question is not whether career preparation is happening. It almost certainly is. The question is whether those efforts are connected in ways that create a coherent student experience.
Students move through higher education as a single experience. Institutions, however, are organized into divisions, departments, and programs. What appears fragmented to students often feels perfectly logical from inside the organizational chart.
That is why I suspect the institutions making the most progress over the next decade will not necessarily be the ones with the most programs.
They will be the ones that become exceptionally good at integration.
And that brings me back to Judy's comment.
"I think we're just at the beginning."
The more I reflect on it, the more I think she was right.
Not because institutions are failing. Not because good work isn't happening.
But because higher education is in the early stages of a much larger shift—from viewing career preparation as a set of services to viewing it as an institutional capability.
P.S. Did you miss our last webinar? Watch it here. Register for upcoming webinars here.
P.P.S. The most important conversations about career strategy rarely happen in isolation. Share this with someone who should be part of the discussion.
