Career services teams often track activity: number of appointments, attendance at events, students reached. Those numbers sound good — but they don’t tell the full story of whether your efforts are actually supporting student career readiness, long-term success, or institutional outcomes. To capture real impact, career services must shift away from activity-based reporting toward outcome-oriented measurement that connects what students do with what they achieve.

Activity counts — such as how many appointments you execute or workshops you deliver — are easy to collect and report. But they only answer how much your office did, not what difference it made in a student’s career trajectory.

Research in career outcomes suggests traditional outcome measures like salary or job title offer only a narrow picture of post-graduation success and often miss nuance like job satisfaction, career fulfillment, or alignment with values and skills. A study in the Journal of Student Affairs Inquiry, Improvement, and Impact highlights that salary and title alone can be misleading and advocates for more holistic, multi-dimensional outcomes frameworks.

In higher education, this challenge has important implications: a student might attend many career center activities and still lack confidence in their career goals or readiness skills — the very aspects leaders increasingly care about.

To measure impact meaningfully, institutions need frameworks that recognize how career readiness develops. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) defines career readiness as a foundation for success in the workplace, based on demonstrable competencies such as communication, professionalism, teamwork, and critical thinking.

Importantly, NACE has operationalized these into an assessment tool — the Career Readiness Competency Assessment — that identifies observable behaviors tied to each competency, offering a way for career services to track growth over time, not just attendance.

This evolution matters because institutions are increasingly seeking ways to connect career services outcomes with broader student success goals — not just first-destination employment, but developmentally meaningful skills that constitute true readiness for careers.

Assessment within career services needs to be longitudinal. That means tracking a student’s development over time — from career exploration and planning in the early college years to post-graduation employment outcomes.

Academics and practitioners have developed models to assess the influence of career readiness and other developmental factors on long-term outcomes. For example, longitudinal research on self-efficacy and career goals has shown that early career self-belief predicts both objective outcomes like salary and subjective outcomes like career satisfaction years after graduation.

Similarly, career registration methodologies that follow students’ employability activities throughout enrollment have found that career readiness growth and engagement in structured experiences are significantly associated with improved employment results after graduation.

The implication is clear: measurement systems must connect student activities to measurable changes in readiness and outcomes — over time — rather than stop at raw participation data.

Senior leaders in colleges and universities are asking more from career services than “how many students we saw this year.”

They want evidence of:

• Developmental progress: Are students gaining demonstrable competencies aligned with workforce needs?
• Equity of impact: Are all students — especially traditionally underserved populations — making measurable progress?
• Career outcomes: Are students securing quality employment or graduate opportunities that align with their goals?
• Institutional value: How does career services contribute to retention, graduation, and post-graduation success?

A benchmark report on career services metrics notes that over 80% of career centers now conduct first-destination surveys — an indicator that outcome tracking is becoming standard practice — but these alone don’t fully capture multi-dimensional readiness or long-term success.

To move beyond activity counts, career services teams can:

• Adopt competency frameworks like NACE’s Career Readiness model to define what readiness means and how to measure it.
• Track progression, not just attendance, by linking early engagements to mid-career events and outcomes. Research on longitudinal methodologies supports this approach for providing insight into long-term employability impacts.
• Connect experiences to outcomes, such as using pre-/post-assessment of career readiness competencies to demonstrate growth.

This isn’t merely a data exercise. It’s also a strategic alignment with institutional priorities like student success, retention, and labor market relevance.

Collecting and analyzing this level of data across cycles — from enrollment to post-graduation — can be challenging without centralized systems. When data lives in spreadsheets or disconnected tools, it’s hard to tell coherent stories about impact.

By implementing systems that support longitudinal data capture, competency assessment, and aggregated outcomes reporting, career services can:

• Reduce manual reporting burden
• Produce visual dashboards linked to institutional outcomes
• Disaggregate results by population groups to support equity goals
• Demonstrate measurable growth in meaningful metrics

These capabilities turn reporting from a compliance task into a strategic asset that elevates the conversation with campus leadership.

Activity metrics like appointments and attendance numbers have value — but they are insufficient for the modern expectations of career services today. To demonstrate real impact, career services teams need to measure readiness progression and long-term outcomes. Grounding measurement in competency frameworks and longitudinal data gives leaders clear evidence of how career services contribute to student success.

If your team is ready to move beyond activity counts and build robust, outcome-focused measurement systems, book a demo of HubbedIn’s career services platform to see how integrated workflows and data tracking can help you measure what truly matters.