The platform will provide a “transcript” for students to present their skills to employers—although, according to a NACE survey, fewer than half of students understand what skills-based hiring is.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | ljubaphoto/E+/Getty Images
As conversations swirl about how colleges can demonstrate their value to students, a new tool from a testing giant aims to help college students better connect to the workforce.
But whether the Educational Testing Service can succeed in addressing what experts have argued is a critical need remains to be seen. Two institutions are on board to pilot the new career navigation system, called Futurenav Compass, after which ETS hopes to expand to more institutions.
The platform allows students to complete assessments of their skills—including hard-to-measure soft skills, like communication, resilience and ability to collaborate—and present them in a “skills-based transcript” they can present to employers, according to Ken Eisner, managing director of global higher education to workforce at ETS. From there, the platform connects users with job and internship opportunities based on their skills and career interests, using artificial intelligence–powered and localized data about the job market.
Futurenav Compass, which will be piloted over the next year by California State University campuses and Brandeis University, aims to address what Eisner called an “inadequate bridge from education to work” in a news release announcing the product. With the help of Futurenav Compass, the company envisions that students will have clearer pathway toward their careers throughout their educational journey.
“What ETS has created is the equivalent of a GPS for careers,” said Arthur Levine, president of Brandeis. “If you imagine your GPS worked the way career planning does today in higher education, what happens is … after an hour, what it would tell you is ‘Oh, bad news. You’re two hours away from the goal and you’re driving in the wrong direction.’ That’s really not particularly helpful. What the ETS tool does is it makes it immediate; it makes it possible to career plan from the time the student arrives on campus.”
The CSU system, similarly, hopes Futurenav Compass will become a tool every student can deploy when they arrive at a CSU campus to help them navigate their educational journey, from courses to internships, with their career pathway in mind.
It also marks ETS’s continued departure from its history as a testing organization best known for creating the GRE, Praxis and TOEFL, though it did lean on its decades of testing expertise in developing the skills assessments.
“This is not the old ETS,” Eisner said.
‘In the Rearview Mirror’
Workforce development experts say they’ll be watching to see whether the product helps students get better jobs after college. Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, noted that other companies have launched similar products in the past: “Some of this has been tried before and it lies scattered in the rearview mirror. So, what makes this any better?”
Eisner said that one of the main things that differentiates ETS’s career navigator, in his view, is that it is more comprehensive—combining assessments, career navigation and job and internship placement in one venue. He also pointed out that the system will use artificial intelligence to provide real-time data on “job transitions,” pulling data from applicant tracking systems and local and federal government agencies.
But Strohl said he worries that those job listings will provide little practical information to students.
“We know that in job ads, certain sectors aren’t covered as well as others. We know that a whole wide body of skills aren’t covered,” he said, noting that he thinks direct connection and engagement with local employers through the platform would be more beneficial than the AI insights.
Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO at the National Association of Colleges and Employers, said that it is indeed becoming increasingly important to employers for applicants to demonstrate their skills in the hiring process, and he applauded ETS for giving students an opportunity to demonstrate “what students are learning in their programs or extracurriculars and take credit for all the things they’ve experienced in life.”
He noted that this platform appears to be the first skills-assessment tool available directly to students; many employers do assess soft skills in the hiring process, but they usually use their own product or something they’ve licensed, rather than being presented them by an applicant.
“That will be interesting to see how they view that when it’s not their own tool validating or looking at the skills,” he said.
Additionally, the concept of skills-based hiring is still mostly foreign to students; according to upcoming data from NACE, VanDerziel said, only 40 percent said they were familiar with skills-based hiring.
Personalized Pathways
The CSU system, one of ETS’s two pilot partners, will pilot the product in just its Los Angeles–area campuses this fall, with each campus selecting a cohort to test-drive the tool. But they eventually hope every CSU student will use Futurenav Compass throughout their college career.
“I think the goal would be with students, as they come in for orientation, as they move onto campus or start a new program, that they’ll have the opportunity to take the career assessment and then identify how that major and that career will meet their career goals,” said Dilcie D. Perez, deputy vice chancellor for academic and student affairs.
She said she hopes the product will contribute toward CSU’s goal that every student can begin a job in their field or graduate education once they complete their undergraduate degree.
“At the core of the student success framework is personalized experiences,” she said. “It’s going to be high-tech, high-touch, and it’s using technology and AI to help a student to do that exploration and develop a path that works for them.”