Guide
What Career Readiness Actually Looks Like
Lessons from 12 Conversations That Changed How We Think About Student Success
There's a version of career readiness that looks very tidy from the outside. Resume reviewed. LinkedIn updated. Cover letter drafted. Interview outfit ready. Internship secured.
And then there's what actually happens.
A student sits across from a recruiter and freezes because they don't know how to talk about who they are, only what they've done. An alumna lands the job she prepared for and realizes within six months that it isn't the right fit — not because she failed, but because no one helped her figure out what fit even meant for her. A first-generation student with extraordinary potential never connects with the mentor who could have changed everything, simply because the infrastructure wasn't there to make the introduction.
Career readiness, as it's often taught, is a checklist. But as the students, executives, educators, and career directors who sat down with Bill Fist and Jerry Goldstein on Bill & Jerry's Excellent Podcast make clear: it was never a checklist. It's a relationship. It's a mindset. It's a community.
PeopleGrove was proud to sponsor Season 1 of the podcast, and what emerged from those conversations was a case study in what career readiness looks like when it's built on real human connection.
Over the course of twelve conversations, a through-line emerged that no résumé workshop or job fair can replicate: the students who found their footing didn't do it alone. They did it through connection, to mentors, alumni, and their communities.
This piece draws together insights from those twelve conversations, for higher education leaders, career services professionals, and anyone thinking seriously about what it takes to prepare students for life beyond graduation.
Career readiness doesn't start at graduation. It begins the moment a student feels seen, supported, and connected.
The Myth of the Linear Path
Why the zigzag isn't a detour.
Ask most students to picture a successful career and they'll describe a straight line: degree, entry-level role, promotion, leadership. Clean. Sequential. Predictable.
Ask the people who built successful careers and you'll hear something very different.
Mike Summers, Chief Career Officer and Executive Director at Davidson College, spent years in corporate sales at GlaxoSmithKline before moving into medical sales, then executive search, and finally higher education. Toni Forte, now Vice President of Partner Marketing at Citibank, started her career imagining herself as a fashion designer or architect before business strategy found her.
Nicole Dubois, Chief Human Resources Officer at Graham, stumbled into HR through a stretch assignment after pivoting away from nursing, therapy, and substance abuse research. Richard Magid left a 20-year career as a commodities trader at the World Trade Center to start a chocolate business before eventually becoming an executive coach with over 35,000 hours of practice.
None of these paths were planned. All of them were purposeful — in retrospect.
Mike Summers frames it simply: your first job is just your first job. It is not a declaration of identity. It is a starting point. Each step adds skills, perspective, and self-knowledge that compound over time into something that, eventually, looks like a career.
Nicole Dubois makes an important and often overlooked distinction: knowing what you don't want is just as valuable as knowing what you do. Her zigzag path was a process of elimination that eventually revealed her strengths. Her advice to early-career professionals is to stop waiting for clarity and start generating it through action.
Every role, even the ones that aren't perfect fits, provides the data points necessary to navigate your own unparalyzed path toward a fulfilling future.
For institutions, the implication is significant. Career services that optimize exclusively for first-destination placement metrics miss the deeper work: helping students build the self-knowledge and adaptability that make any destination manageable. When alumni who took winding roads are made accessible to current students, the permission to explore becomes visible.
That is what a robust alumni mentorship network does, it multiplies the number of non-linear stories a student can access, and in doing so, it expands what they believe is possible for themselves.
Mentorship Isn't a Program — It's a Relationship
The difference between transactional support and transformational access
Eleana Kakis, a junior at Fordham University studying English and journalism, almost didn't apply to the RAM Connect mentoring program. A fellow student convinced her. She was paired with Enes Pagnuzzi, a producer at NBC4 New York. Together they built a structured plan around Eleana's goals and development. Within months, Eleana was shadowing Enes in the newsroom — observing script preparation, live production, and every layer of how a professional media operation runs. She landed a summer internship with Shop Today, part of NBC and the Today Show.
The story is remarkable. But what makes it replicable is the architecture behind it: a program with intention, a match made thoughtfully, a structure that gave the relationship room to grow into something real.
Lea, a recent Fordham graduate originally from Vietnam who relocated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to study New Media and Digital Design, found her career path through a social referral that led to an art gallery internship. What she took away wasn't just the experience, it was a fundamental reframe of how the professional world works. Hiring, she realized, operates less like a rigid machine and more like a social network. People tell people about things. The quality of your connections matters as much as the quality of your credentials.
Leah, a University of Miami alumna now working as a senior associate at PwC, used LinkedIn and the support of mentors to navigate a pandemic that cut her internship short. The skills she brought to that navigation including discipline, communication, and the confidence to reach out were ones she built as a college cheerleader. Her mentor relationships gave her a model for how to move through the professional world with intentionality rather than anxiety.
Mentorship is not just about advice. It is about access, structure, and support.
The thread connecting these three stories is that mentorship, when it works, is not primarily about information transfer. It is about access, to people, to environments, to possibilities a student couldn't have seen from inside the campus bubble. Eleana didn't just learn about the NBC newsroom. She stood in it. She watched what it looked like at 6 AM before a live broadcast. That kind of access changes how a person sees themselves in relation to a career. No workshop replicates it.
For institutions, the challenge is scale. Exceptional mentorship relationships happen organically on every campus, but they happen unevenly, clustering around the students who already know to seek them out, who already have the social capital to navigate the ask.
The question isn't whether mentorship works. Across 650+ institutions, 68% of students using PeopleGrove report a sense of belonging, and 33% receive job offers through their connections.
The question is whether every student, including the ones who don't know where to start, has a genuine on-ramp to a relationship that can change their trajectory. PeopleGrove's mentorship and alumni network tools are built specifically to solve this. The platform connects students with alumni mentors, career professionals, and peers through structured programs that institutions can manage, track, and scale, so that a student like Eleana, who almost didn't apply to RAM Connect, has a path in regardless of whether a friend happened to nudge her in the right direction.
Fordham University is among the clearest examples of what this looks like at institutional scale. Using PeopleGrove's Experience Hub to support its Internship Promise, a commitment that every student will have access to at least one meaningful experiential learning opportunity before graduation, Fordham achieved a 40% growth in alumni participation, a 175% increase in mentoring activity, and scaled experiential learning participation from fewer than 100 students per year to more than 1,800 per semester, without proportional increases in staff or cost. The infrastructure behind that promise is what made it real.
Networking Is Storytelling — Not Selling
How the students who land opportunities think about connection differently
Sophia, a rising senior at the University of Miami's Herbert Business School, wanted to work in financial services. She was a marketing major with no direct path, no legacy connections to Wall Street, and no Ivy League credential. What she had was a strategy and she executed it with the discipline of someone who had spent years as a professional dancer.
Before Citibank arrived on campus for a recruitment event, Sophia had already coffee-chatted with every former intern from her university who had worked in the Treasury and Trade Solutions division. She came to every meeting with a notebook and a specific question. She always left with one more name to reach out to. By the time the campus event happened, she wasn't a cold application, she was a familiar face who could speak specifically about Citi's culture, its people, and why she wanted to be part of it.
Mike Summers describes networking not as a transaction but as storytelling. When students frame outreach as an opportunity to connect their story to someone else's, the dynamic shifts entirely. It stops being about asking for something and starts being about building something.
Jarrett Birnbaum, a University of Maryland graduate who spent a year working in corporate photography before taking the leap into full-time freelance, built 99% of his first year of business through existing relationships and word-of-mouth. From texting a friend for his first New York music photography gig to showing up at fitness entrepreneur events, Jarrett treated every interaction as a branding moment. In the creative world, he argues, the social skill of connecting and proving your value through action is often more important than technical skill alone.
His advice for those trying to break into a new field is direct: show, don't tell. When he wanted to pivot from music to sports photography, he didn't wait for a job offer. He offered to shoot events for free to build a portfolio that proved his skills translated. That's not naivety, it's entrepreneurial thinking.
The most valuable resource in any career is the wisdom of the people who have already walked the path.
The students who thrive understand instinctively what many job-seekers spend years learning: that networking isn't a numbers game. It's a quality game.
Sophia didn't collect contacts, instead she built a community of advocates inside Citibank before she ever sat down for a formal interview. The research backs what her story demonstrates: 70% of jobs are filled through network strategies, and making direct contact with alumni, recruiters, and employers exponentially increases the chances of finding a role.
Separately, research shows that students who participate in a structured job search intervention are three times more likely to land a job, with the two most effective components being improved job search skills and enhanced motivation to persist in the process. When institutions create structured environments for students to practice this kind of intentional connection, whether through alumni networks, mentoring platforms, career communities, or in-person events, they're helping students develop one of the most durable professional skills there is.
This is where PeopleGrove's Events Module within the Engagement Hub becomes relevant in a way that isn't always obvious. Career fairs, employer info sessions, alumni panels, and coaching events are not just logistics problems, they are relationship-building infrastructure. When those events are managed within the same platform where a student's mentoring history, career assessments, and alumni connections already live, every registration becomes a tracked engagement touchpoint.
And for institutions running school-specific events, an engineering career fair, a business school alumni panel, the right event reaches the right students without cross-department noise.
The moment Sophia showed up at Citibank's campus takeover event already knowing analysts by name didn't happen by accident. It happened because she had done the relational groundwork. Institutions that treat events as part of a connected engagement ecosystem, rather than a one-off calendar item, give more students the conditions to do the same.
Identity Before Industry
Why values-first career development outperforms passion-first advice
Dr. Allison McWilliams, Associate Vice President of Mentoring and Personal and Career Development at Wake Forest University, has a problem with the word passion.
Not because passion is unimportant, but because the cultural pressure to find your one true passion at 22 and align your entire career to it is, as she puts it, often a product of privilege.
It assumes that students have the luxury of following a singular calling, unconstrained by financial reality, family obligation, or the simple fact that most 22-year-olds haven't lived enough life to know what they love.
The model she helped build at Wake Forest, under the leadership of Andy Chan, started from a different premise: before students can know what they want to do, they need to know who they are. The Office of Personal and Career Development (OPCD) isn't a placement office. It's a developmental ecosystem. It walks alongside students, and alumni, through job number one all the way to job number ten, supporting the full arc of a professional life.
The five pillars she outlines in her book, Five for Your First Five, apply to any career stage: master the work itself, build a balanced life, find a community of mentors and sponsors, practice deep reflection, and own what's next. Across all five, the common denominator is intentionality, treating every professional experience as data to inform the next decision, rather than a destination to evaluate against some imagined ideal.
For Vanessa Albert, the student producer who co-hosted the first episode of Bill & Jerry's Excellent Podcast, the question of identity is still unfolding. Her honesty about that, about preparing for graduation in a world that expects clarity when most students are still learning who they are, is itself a kind of wisdom. Career readiness, as she embodies it, isn't about having the answers. It's about having the language to ask better questions.
You have the agency to own your career and your life — provided you have the tools to reflect and the community to support you.
The institutional implication here is uncomfortable for many career services models: résumé reviews and interview prep, valuable as they are, cannot substitute for the developmental work of helping students build self-knowledge.
The tools that do this well, values reflections, mentored conversations, structured journaling, alumni storytelling, require investment in relationships, not just resources. And the stakes are higher than placement rates alone.
Career fit is a retention issue. Students are more likely to persist semester-to-semester and year-to-year when they are engaged, succeeding, and able to see a path to a meaningful future.
When students are pursuing a major or career path that genuinely matches their interests, they work harder, overcome obstacles more readily, and show up with a drive that no amount of academic advising alone can manufacture. T
his is the core insight behind Holland's Theory of Career Choice, foundational to the research of Dr. Bryan Dik, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Colorado State University and co-creator of PathwayU by PeopleGrove. The theory explains simply: pursuing a path that fits our interests leads to persistence and success. Abilities are the engine. Interests are the rudder.
PeopleGrove addresses this directly through PathwayU, a science-backed career guidance platform that gives students validated assessments of their interests, values, personality, and workplace preferences, delivering personalized career insights and job matching at an institutional scale no counselor-to-student ratio can match alone.
The data is significant: students who receive career counseling are 2.6 times more likely to be employed after graduation, and platforms integrating evidence-based career interventions see a 30% increase in student engagement.
Institutions that have embedded PathwayU early in the student journey such as Western Kentucky University, use it in freshman experience courses and make it available to transfer students before admission.
Berry College uses assessment scores to match students to on-campus jobs, reporting that the tool helps students make more intentional choices about their path, which in turn drives the persistence that keeps them enrolled. For institutions under enrollment pressure, this is not a soft benefit. It is a structural one.
The Skills Nobody Is Naming
How unexpected backgrounds become career superpowers, when students know how to frame them
Sophia was a professional dancer before she was a finance intern. Leah was a college cheerleader before she was a PwC associate. Lea relocated from Vietnam to New York City during a global pandemic before she learned to see her own tenacity as a professional asset. Nicole Dubois led a dormitory of college residents through the immediate aftermath of September 11th before she led a human resources organization.
None of these experiences look like career preparation. All of them were.
The challenge is translation. Students with unconventional backgrounds often arrive at career conversations without the vocabulary to frame what they've built. They apologize for the detour instead of articulating the discipline. They minimize the dance training instead of naming the time management, the performance pressure, the ability to execute under scrutiny.
Sophia explicitly draws the line between competitive dance at age twelve, learning to interact with industry professionals, managing a high-pressure schedule, and the composure she brought to her Citibank Super Day interviews years later.
Steve Blum from Yale Career Services, a guest on her episode, identified what she was describing as Ikigai: the intersection of what she loves, what she is good at, and what the market values. Sophia had found it. But she needed the language to name it.
That is what mentors do, at their best. They don't just open doors. They help students see which doors are worth walking through, and they provide the vocabulary to describe what's in the student's hand when they knock.
For international students, the translation challenge is compounded by structural anxiety. Lea, navigating the ticking clock of visa sponsorship, initially saw potential employers as threats, high-stakes encounters where she only had one chance to make an impression. The reframe, encouraged by career advisor Mike Summers in her episode, was significant: her persistence, her adaptability, her story of a 24-hour journey from Vietnam to New York, these were assets, not liabilities. The cover letter, he noted, is where a candidate's unique story can come alive. It is not the place to sound like everyone else.
In the creative world, the social skill of connecting and proving your value through action is often more important than technical skill alone.
Institutions that invest in helping students articulate their full selves, not just their GPAs and internship titles, produce graduates who can walk into any room and tell a story that is genuinely their own.
That kind of career confidence isn't taught in a workshop. It's built in relationship, through conversations with mentors who have learned the same translation for themselves. It's also built through structure. PeopleGrove's Experience Hub addresses this directly with co-curricular transcripts, a tangible, shareable record of a student's experiences, skills, and competencies that sits alongside their academic record. Where a traditional transcript shows what a student studied, a co-curricular transcript shows what they did with it: the internship they completed, the research they contributed to, the service learning they undertook, the competencies they developed along the way.
What Institutions Get Wrong — And What Wake Forest Got Right
Systemic change versus programmatic tweaks
Most career services teams are under-resourced, understaffed, and evaluated against a metric — first-destination placement rate — that captures the very end of the journey while telling us almost nothing about the quality of the path that got there.
The fix that gets proposed most often is more: more workshops, more employer panels, more resume review slots, more LinkedIn training sessions.
What Wake Forest did differently was architectural. Under Andy Chan's leadership, the university dissolved the traditional career center and rebuilt it from the ground up as the Office of Personal and Career Development, a philosophical shift that started with a different question. Not 'how do we place students in jobs?' but 'how do we develop people who are capable of building meaningful careers across a lifetime?'
Lindsay's story, shared in a follow-up episode with Dr. McWilliams, demonstrates what this kind of preparation produces. Facing a potential layoff, Lindsay didn't apply to a hundred jobs online. She went deeper into her own institution, doing the research that most candidates skip: mapping internal stakeholders, understanding where her transferable skills from risk management could create value in a client-facing role, and then putting herself directly on a hiring manager's calendar. She turned a near-layoff into a promotion as a Relationship Associate.
Nicole Dubois, hiring for senior roles at Graham, articulates what she looks for in candidates with characteristic directness: curiosity. Not credentials, not a perfect GPA, not a linear path. Curiosity, as the genuine desire to understand the organization, its mission, the people in the room, and how the role connects to something larger.
Recruiters are flooded with Easy Apply applications. The only way to survive the noise is to differentiate yourself by doing the work for the hiring manager.
The lesson for institutions isn't that every school needs to replicate Wake Forest's model exactly. It's that the underlying philosophy, students as whole people navigating a career across a lifetime, has to be present in whatever model a school builds.
PeopleGrove was designed to be the connective tissue that makes this philosophy operational at scale: linking career services, alumni relations, and student success into one coherent, persistent experience rather than three disconnected programs that expire at graduation.
In practice, that means a student can discover internship opportunities through Experience Hub, PeopleGrove's centralized platform for experiential learning that unifies discovery, skill development, validation, and reporting in one place, connect with an alumni mentor in their field through Engagement Hub, complete a science-backed career assessment through PathwayU, register for an employer career fair, and have every one of those touchpoints tracked and visible to the institution, all within a single system.
Career services can coordinate experiences. Alumni offices can activate their networks. Advancement teams can manage donor cultivation events with approval workflows and attendee reporting tied directly to donor profiles. Leadership can see in real time how many students are actually participating in meaningful opportunities, with dashboards that replace the spreadsheets and manual reporting that currently consume staff time.
It Was Always About Connection
Twelve conversations. Twelve very different paths. One consistent truth.
The students who found their way, to NBC internships, to Citibank trading desks, to PwC associate roles, to full-time creative careers, didn't do it by submitting more applications or attending more career fairs. They did it through a web of relationships, conversations, and communities that helped them see themselves more clearly and move forward with more confidence.
Eleana had Enes. Sophia had a network she built intentionally before the recruiting season began. Leah had mentors who helped her translate the discipline of cheerleading into the language of professional development. Jarrett had a community of clients that grew from a single text message to a friend.
None of these moments were accidental. But none of them were guaranteed either. Each one depended on the right infrastructure being in place, a program that made the match, a platform that surfaced the connection, an institution that had decided mentorship and community were not nice-to-haves but fundamental to what it meant to prepare a student for life beyond graduation.
The research from Dr. Dik and Dr. Kurt Kraiger, Chair of the Management Department at the University of Memphis, frames the institutional opportunity in three steps: help students imagine a preferred future through science-based assessments; help them prepare for that future by connecting career clarity to experiential learning; and help them seize it through structured, network-driven job search support.
Across more than 650 institutions, PeopleGrove's platform addresses all three because they were always the same problem: students need to feel connected to a meaningful future, and institutions need the infrastructure to make that possible at scale.
The institutions that lead on career readiness in 2026 and beyond are not the ones with the most sophisticated résumé tools. They are the ones that have decided, architecturally, philosophically, and operationally, that connection is not the exception. It is the expectation.
Connections should not be the exception. They should be the expectation.
The Evidence, At Scale
68%
of students using PeopleGrove report a sense of belonging
33%
receive job offers through their PeopleGrove connections
650+
institutions trust PeopleGrove to power their career communities
2.6x
more likely to be employed after graduation for students who receive career counseling
30%
increase in student engagement when institutions use evidence-based career platforms
70%
of jobs are filled through network strategies — direct alumni and employer contact is the most effective path
3x
more likely to land a job when students participate in a structured job search intervention
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