Reading a Career Readiness Program as an Activity System

Career readiness programs at universities are difficult to evaluate because they are almost never one thing. They are collections of tools, mandates, workflows, and people that accumulated over years, often built by different offices to solve different problems, then bolted together under a single brand. When leadership asks whether the program is working, the honest answer usually starts with a question: which part?

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory offers a useful frame for this. Rather than treating a career readiness program as a service to be measured against outcomes, CHAT invites you to map it as an activity system — a set of actors working toward an object using tools, mediated by rules, community, and division of labor. Once mapped, the productive questions become visible: where do the elements reinforce each other, and where do they contradict?

I'll draw on my current work leading a career readiness initiative at a large private technological university in the Midwest to make this concrete. I'll call it Elevate. Names of vendors, offices, and specific programs are generalized where doing so preserves the analytical point without exposing institutional detail.

Mapping the parts

A career readiness system typically contains eight to ten distinct elements. Most institutions can't name all of them in a single conversation, which is itself diagnostic. Here are the ones I'd surface first.

• The competency framework. The intellectual backbone of the program — a defined set of skills, capabilities, or dispositions the institution has decided constitute career readiness. In our case this is a 75-badge structure mapped to NACE, WEF, CASEL, and P21 frameworks and spanning first-year through senior tracks, transfer, commuter, and pre-college pathways. Some institutions use NACE's eight competencies as-is. Some build custom frameworks. Some have no framework at all and treat career readiness as whatever the career center happens to offer.
• The credentialing layer. How the framework becomes visible to students and employers. Badges, micro-credentials, digital transcripts, LinkedIn integrations. The credentialing layer is where most institutions underinvest — a beautiful framework with no visible reward for students is a hobby, not a program.
• The engagement platform. The student-facing digital environment where they discover events, book appointments, log activities, and see their progress. Common vendors include uConnect, Symplicity, Handshake, and 12twenty. The engagement platform is the primary user experience of the program for undergraduates.
• The learning management infrastructure. The systems that hold the actual instructional content — assessments, workshops, self-paced modules, video libraries. Sometimes this lives in the institutional LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle); sometimes in a career-services-specific platform; sometimes across both, which creates its own problems.
• The workflow and event management layer. How events are scheduled, staffed, and tracked. Often a separate system from the engagement platform — CampusGroups, Presence, or homegrown solutions.
• The industry partnership infrastructure. Employer relationships, workforce partnerships, credit-bearing pathways with corporate education providers, industry-recognized certification pipelines. In our case this includes an AWS Academy Center of Excellence, quantum computing workforce partnerships, and pathways with Kaplan and Braven.
• The analytics and reporting layer. How the institution actually knows what's happening — dashboards, First Destination Survey data, engagement metrics, learning outcome tracking.
• The human staffing model. Full-time career coaches, faculty embedded in college-specific career centers, student cohort managers, success coaches, work-study staff. The people who translate systems into service.
• The governance and policy layer. Who owns career readiness at the institution, who has authority to require it, how it interacts with academic policy, and where it sits organizationally — student affairs, academic affairs, provost's office, or a hybrid.
• The external partnership and vendor layer. The contracts, service level agreements, and platform integrations that determine what the institution can and can't do without going back to procurement.

Looking for contradictions

Once the parts are mapped, the analytical work is identifying where they pull against each other. CHAT calls these contradictions, and they're the sites where systems either evolve or fail. A few patterns I see repeatedly in career readiness programs.

• Contradiction between competency framework and engagement platform. The framework promises to develop specific skills. The platform surfaces events and appointments. If the platform can't tag content to the framework — or if students can't see their progress against it — the framework becomes theoretical. Students engage with events without seeing how they build the competencies the institution claims to develop.
• Contradiction between credentialing and academic policy. Badges and micro-credentials exist outside the academic transcript. In most institutions they carry no credit weight and no requirement force. This creates a two-tier system where the career readiness credential the institution asks students to pursue is simultaneously deemed non-essential by the institution's own academic structures. Students read this contradiction quickly. They engage at the level of institutional seriousness. This one deserves its own treatment, which I've offered in a companion piece: The Credential Nobody Requires — https://freddricklogan.com/notes/credential-nobody-requires
• Contradiction between industry partnerships and internal capacity. Institutions sign partnerships with AWS, Google, Salesforce, Coursera, and workforce development providers, then discover they lack the internal staff, workflow, or governance to operationalize them. The partnership exists on paper. The value never reaches students at scale.
• Contradiction between engagement platform and learning management infrastructure. Students discover a workshop on the engagement platform, complete it in the LMS, and their completion doesn't flow back to their progress dashboard. Or an assessment lives in one system while the artifact it produced lives in another. The student experience fractures across systems the institution owns but hasn't integrated.
• Contradiction between the human staffing model and the scale of the ambition. Career readiness programs are frequently designed as if every student will receive high-touch coaching, then staffed at ratios where that's impossible. The framework promises individualized development. The staffing model can only deliver group programming. The gap gets filled with digital content that may or may not substitute for what was promised.
• Contradiction between analytics and governance. The institution collects extensive data on engagement, outcomes, and completion. The governance structure has no regular decision-making cadence that acts on it. Dashboards get built. Reports get sent. Nothing changes.
• Contradiction between division of labor and object. Career services owns career development, but so does academic advising, faculty mentoring, alumni engagement, and increasingly the deans of individual colleges. When multiple actors work toward the same object without clear division of labor, effort duplicates in some areas and evaporates in others.

Why this framing is useful

The value of reading career readiness as an activity system rather than as a service is that it moves the conversation from is it working? to where is it working, and where does the system contradict itself in ways that predict where it will fail next?

This is a more actionable question. It surfaces investments that would resolve genuine contradictions rather than merely adding to the pile. It reveals which contradictions are structural — requiring policy or organizational change — versus which are technical, requiring only better integration or clearer workflow.

It also protects against a common failure mode in career readiness leadership, which is the assumption that the next platform, the next credential, the next partnership will solve problems that are actually contradictions between elements the institution already owns. New elements added to an unmapped system almost always create new contradictions faster than they resolve old ones.

The mapping and contradiction analysis take time — realistically several weeks of interviews, artifact review, and workshop conversations with the offices involved. The output is usually a diagram with more contradictions than any leader wants to see. But the diagram is the honest picture, and the honest picture is where useful change starts.

References

Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Full text, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UC San Diego: https://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/intro.htm

Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080020028747

Engeström, Y., & Sannino, A. (2010). Studies of expansive learning: Foundations, findings and future challenges. Educational Research Review, 5(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2009.12.002

Leont'ev, A. N. (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Full text, Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UC San Diego: https://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/leontev/

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press. In copyright; no open-access edition.

National Association of Colleges and Employers. Career readiness: competencies for a career-ready workforce. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined/

World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/

Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. CASEL's SEL framework. https://casel.org/casel-sel-framework-11-2020/

Battelle for Kids. P21 Framework for 21st Century Learning. https://www.battelleforkids.org/insights/p21-resources/

Sannino, A., Engeström, Y., & Lemos, M. (2016). Formative interventions for expansive learning and transformative agency. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 599–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2016.1204547