Measuring Career Readiness: Challenges & New Approaches

Our annual conference, RILS, explores new approaches

The Reidy Interactive Learning Series will be held Sept. 24-25 in Portsmouth, N.H. Join us! Click here for the agenda and registration information.

At the Center, we all take turns organizing our annual conference, the Reidy Interactive Learning Series (RILS). This year it’s our turn, and we faced the daunting challenge of selecting one topic from a long list of important issues. For a variety of reasons, we’ve decided to focus on measuring career readiness.

We’ve had countless conversations with the Center’s partners, leaders in K-12 education and even our own young-adult children, and this topic keeps surfacing as important and unresolved. The topic isn’t new; For decades, our field has been building an understanding of what it means to be career-ready upon high school completion, and how we should measure that readiness. But powerful dynamics have shifted in recent years that invite us to grapple afresh with these questions: artificial intelligence, deep shifts in the economy, skills employers persistently complain their young hires lack.

Unfortunately, our field is nowhere close to consensus on what skills should be measured or when and how to monitor and evaluate career readiness. To do any of those things, states need data from high-quality measures. That’s why we felt this topic was ripe for the gathering of great minds that is RILS! Some of the questions that have emerged clearly in our conversations include:

The relationships among readiness for careers, other postsecondary pursuits (including college and military service), and participation in civic life;
Whether and how to measure skills like critical thinking and communication in ways that align with employers’ needs while recognizing that applying these skills to a math problem is not the same as using them to analyze a novel; and
How to evaluate the reach and quality of career and technical education (CTE) programs.

AI’s Role in Measuring Career Readiness

And of course we need to address the proverbial elephant in the room, AI. Advances in AI will affect both how we define career readiness and how we measure it. On the first point, we hear arguments that ensuring facility with AI tools should be a core component of education, though what that looks like—and how to ensure competencies like “AI literacy” are defined in ways that reflect students’ likely futures and long-term career paths—is anyone’s guess. (Consider, for example, the evolution of prompt engineering from a hot, stand-alone occupation to a set of baseline skills that everyone now needs.)

Despite this uncertainty, educators at all levels can take meaningful steps to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets they will need to use the tools available today while engaging in continuous learning to support mastery of tomorrow’s tools.

AI is also changing how assessments are designed, administered, and scored, but neither the research base nor available practical guidance has fully kept up with advances in this area. At RILS we will hear from experts who are thinking about how assessment design must evolve to support valid inferences about career readiness that appropriately account for the role of AI.

All these topics are ripe for serious debate, and RILS is the perfect place to have it!

What You Can Expect at RILS 2026

RILS is designed to bring together participants with complementary expertise to explore how career readiness should be defined, measured, and used to inform educational decision-making.

At RILS 2026 we’ll learn from:

National organizations leading career-readiness initiatives, including experts working with states to define career readiness and develop policy and accountability strategies that better prepare students for postsecondary success;
Researchers studying the future of work and durable skills, who will share current evidence on the competencies students need to succeed in a rapidly changing economy and the challenges associated with measuring those competencies;
State, district, and higher education leaders, who will discuss how they are designing, implementing, and evaluating career readiness measures while partnering with employers, industry, and local communities; and
Assessment and measurement experts, who will explore innovative approaches to measuring career readiness—including the implications of AI, and validity considerations.

The “I” in RILS stands for “interactive,” and we take that descriptor seriously. Every session is designed to promote meaningful discussion among panelists and attendees, and allow plenty of time for informal conversations. Participants will learn not only from the panelists but from the diverse group of leaders and experts who attend RILS. We invite you to join us in discussing the future of career readiness and how it should be measured.

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages